lakh

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lakh is 4 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lɑkʰ/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,258 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "One hundred thousand (10⁵): 100,000, that is, with Indian digit grouping, 1,00,000.".

Our generated misspelling index lists 6 likely wrong-spelling variants for lakh, with forms such as "alkh", "lahk", and "lakhh". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "law", "lay", "las", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Hindustani लाख or لاکھ (lākh), from Sanskrit लक्ष (lakṣa), from लक्ष् (lakṣ, “to mark; to sign; to observe, perceive”), possibly from रक्ष् (rakṣ, “to observe (a duty, law, etc.); to guard, protect”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₂lek… 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 lakh, spelled L-A-K-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.