lacrosse

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lacrosse is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ləˈkɹɒs/. Corpus data places it at rank #17,171 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A sport played on a field between two opposing teams using sticks (crosses) and a ball, whereby one team defeats the other by scoring more goals within the allotted time.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for lacrosse, with forms such as "alcrosse", "laccrosse", and "lacorsse". 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, "lactose", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Canadian French la crosse (“the stick”). 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 lacrosse, spelled L-A-C-R-O-S-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.