lethal

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lethal is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈliː.θəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,813 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Of, pertaining to, or causing death; deadly; mortal; fatal.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for lethal, with forms such as "elthal", "lehtal", and "letahl". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "legal", "Latham", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Latin lētālis (“deadly, mortal, fatal”), improperly written lēthālis, from lētum (“death”), improperly written as lēthum, from a supposed connection with Ancient Greek λήθη (lḗthē, “oblivion, forgetfulness”). 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 lethal, spelled L-E-T-H-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.