Legendre symbol

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Legendre symbol is 15 letters long, classified as a noun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A mathematical function of an integer and a prime number, written (a/p), which indicates whether a is a quadratic residue modulo p.".

No misspelling variants are generated for Legendre symbol 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: Named after French mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833), who introduced the symbol in 1798 in his work Essai sur la Théorie des Nombres ("Essay on the Theory of Numbers"). 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 Legendre symbol, spelled L-E-G-E-N-D-R-E- -S-Y-M-B-O-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.