jacob

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Jacob is 5 letters long, classified as aname, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈd͡ʒeɪkəb/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,866 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for Jacob, with forms such as "ajcob", "jacbo", and "jaccob". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 10 confusable-pair relationships, "job", "Jason", "Jacobs", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English Iacob, from Late Latin Iācōbus, from Ancient Greek Ἰάκωβος (Iákōbos), from Biblical Hebrew יַעֲקֹב (yaʿăqōḇ, literally “he will/shall heel”), from עָקֵב (ʿāqēḇ, “heel”). Doublet of James. 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 Jacob, spelled J-A-C-O-B, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.