isotope

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for isotope is 7 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈaɪ.sə.təʊp/. Corpus data places it at rank #23,875 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Any of two or more forms of an element where the atoms have the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons within their nuclei. Thus, isotopes have the same atomic number but a diff...".

Our generated misspelling index lists 9 likely wrong-spelling variants for isotope, with forms such as "iostope", "isootpe", and "isotoep". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. It also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "isotopic", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From iso- (“equal”) + -tope (“place”), because the different isotopes of an element always occupy the same place in the periodic table. The term was coined by Scottish doctor Margaret Todd in 1909 and first used publicly on February 27, 1913 by English chem… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is isotope, spelled I-S-O-T-O-P-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.