letter

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for letter is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlɛtə/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,196 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for letter, with forms such as "eltter", "leter", and "letetr". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "lever", "liter", "lotte", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English letter, lettre, from Old French letre, from Latin littera (“letter of the alphabet"; in plural, "epistle”). Displaced Old English bōcstæf (literally “book staff”) in sense 1 and ǣrendġewrit (literally “message writing”) in sense 2. 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 letter, spelled L-E-T-T-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.