ladder

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ladder is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlad.ə/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,804 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 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 ladder, with forms such as "aldder", "ladderr", and "laddre". 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, "later", "layer", "laser", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English ladder, laddre; from Old English hlǣder, from Proto-West Germanic *hlaidriju, from Proto-Germanic *hlaidrijō, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱlóydʰrom, from *ḱley- (“to lean”). Compare Scots ledder, North Frisian ladder, Saterland F… 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 ladder, spelled L-A-D-D-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.