L'Anse-au-Diable

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for L'Anse-au-Diable is 16 letters long, classified as a proper noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈnæn.si ˈd͡ʒɒ.bl̩z/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A ghost town in Labrador, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.".

No misspelling variants are generated for L'Anse-au-Diable in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From French L'Anse-au-Diable, derived in turn from anse (“cove, small bay”) and diable (“devil”). The settlement was named after a dangerous headland located nearby. 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 L'Anse-au-Diable, spelled L-'-A-N-S-E---A-U---D-I-A-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.