leave

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for leave is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /liːv/. Corpus data places it at rank #457 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 14 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for leave, with forms such as "elave", "laeve", and "leaev". 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, "lee", "lev", "love", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English leven, from Old English lǣfan (“to leave”), from Proto-West Germanic *laibijan, from Proto-Germanic *laibijaną (“to let stay, leave”), causative of *lībaną (“to stay, remain”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyp- (“to stick; fat”). Cognate w… 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 leave, spelled L-E-A-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.