length

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for length is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lɛŋ(k)θ/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,765 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for length, with forms such as "elngth", "legnth", and "lenggth". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "lent", "lengthy", "lengthen", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lengthe, from Old English lengþ, lengþu, from Proto-West Germanic *langiþu, from Proto-Germanic *langiþō, equivalent to long + -th (abstract nominal suffix). Cognate with Scots lenth, lainth (“length”), Saterland Frisian Loangte (“length… 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 length, spelled L-E-N-G-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.