lesson

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lesson is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlɛs.ən/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,177 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To instruct to teach.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for lesson, with forms such as "elsson", "leson", and "lesosn". 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 18 confusable-pair relationships, "Lisbon", "Liston", "Leyton", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lessoun, from Old French leçon, from Latin lēctiō, lēctiōnem (“a reading”), from legō (“to read; to gather”). Doublet of lection. 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 lesson, spelled L-E-S-S-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.