likely

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for likely is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlaɪkli/. Corpus data places it at rank #637 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for likely, with forms such as "ilkely", "liekly", and "likelly". 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 12 confusable-pair relationships, "lily", "likes", "Lilly", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English likely, likly, lykly, likliche, from Old English ġelīclīċ (“suitable”) and Old Norse líkligr (“likely”) (probably independent formations), equivalent to like + -ly (adjectival suffix). 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 likely, spelled L-I-K-E-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.