license

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for license is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlaɪ.səns/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,902 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 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 license, with forms such as "ilcense", "lciense", and "liccense". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "licensed", "licensee", "licensure", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English licence, licens, lisence, lissens, licance, from Old French licence, from Latin licentia (“license”), from licens, present participle of licere (“to be allowed, be allowable”); compare linquere, Ancient Greek λείπω (leípō, “leave”). 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 license, spelled L-I-C-E-N-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.