lick

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lick is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,076 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for lick, with forms such as "ilck", "lcik", and "licck". 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, "lie", "lit", "lip", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English likken, from Old English liccian, from Proto-West Germanic *likkōn, from Proto-Germanic *likkōną, from Proto-Indo-European *leyǵʰ- (“to lick”). Sense evolution towards violence unclear; not paralleled in any other Germanic language. See … 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 lick, spelled L-I-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.