kilometre

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for kilometre is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kɪˈlɒmɪtə/. Corpus data places it at rank #22,131 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "An SI unit of length equal to 10³ metres. Symbol: km".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for kilometre, with forms such as "iklometre", "killometre", and "kilmoetre". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "kilometer", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰes- Proto-Indo-European *-lom Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰesliyoy Proto-Hellenic *kʰehliyoi Ancient Greek χίλιοι (khílioi)der. French kilo- Proto-Indo-European *meh₁- Proto-Indo-European *-tḗr Proto-Indo-European *-trom Prot… 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 kilometre, spelled K-I-L-O-M-E-T-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.