lethal injection

noun

"lethal-injection" is a 15-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.

The verdict

“lethal injection” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.

Unranked
below top-frequency English
16
letters

According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A means of execution or of euthanasia in which a person is injected with a fatal dose of drugs.

Corpus desk

Index EN-lethal-injection · lethal injection · English

lethal injection · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables

  • FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
  • LEN-MEGA 16 letters
  • VOW-6 6 vowels
  • CONFUS-0 No pairs
  • VAR-0 0 variants
  • BOOK-THIN "L" thin
  • PHOTO-UNK Peer pending

Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern

Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.

Key facts for lethal injection
PropertyValue
Headwordlethal injection
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechNoun
Letters16
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Long-tail rank of “lethal injection” in English

lethal injectionfalls outside the top-100,000 ranked English words, the long-tail zone of technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary, exactly where readers second-guess spellings most.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Rare enough to double-check

lethal injection is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A means of execution or of euthanasia in which a person is injected with a fatal dose of drugs.".

lethal injection doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.

No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is lethal injection, spelled L-E-T-H-A-L- -I-N-J-E-C-T-I-O-N.

Definition

  1. 1
    A means of execution or of euthanasia in which a person is injected with a fatal dose of drugs.

Recorded use

Wiktionary example

These source excerpts show how lethal injection appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.

  1. Reggie Clemons has one last chance to save his life. After 19 years on death row in Missouri for the murder of two young women, he has been granted a final opportunity to persuade a judge that he should be spared execution by lethal injection.

Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "lethal injection"?
"lethal injection" is spelled L-E-T-H-A-L- -I-N-J-E-C-T-I-O-N.
What does "lethal injection" mean?
As a noun, "lethal injection" means: A means of execution or of euthanasia in which a person is injected with a fatal dose of drugs.
What language does "lethal injection" come from?
"lethal injection" is a English word. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data for this and other words across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German on PlainSpell.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
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Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list