karma

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for karma is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kərm(ə)/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,563 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 karma, with forms such as "akrma", "kamra", and "karam". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "kart", "Kira", "kaya", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Sanskrit कर्म (kárma), nom.sg. of कर्मन् (kárman, “act, action, performance”); first attested in English in 1785 in a translation of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins. 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 karma, spelled K-A-R-M-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.