licorice

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for licorice is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlɪ.k(ə).ɹɪʃ/. Corpus data places it at rank #34,959 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 11 likely wrong-spelling variants for licorice, with forms such as "ilcorice", "lciorice", and "liccorice". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lycorys, from Old French licoresse, from Late Latin liquiritia, alteration of Ancient Greek γλυκύρριζα (glukúrrhiza): γλυκύς (glukús, “sweet”) + ῥίζα (rhíza, “root”) (English glucose, English rhizome). Doublet of glycyrrhiza. 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 licorice, spelled L-I-C-O-R-I-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.