lamia

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lamia is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈleɪmɪə/. Corpus data places it at rank #61,580 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A monster preying upon human beings, who sucked the blood of children, often described as having the head and breasts of a woman and the lower half of a serpent.".

No misspelling variants are generated for lamia 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 Latin lamia, from Ancient Greek Λάμια (Lámia). 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 lamia, spelled L-A-M-I-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.