likeness

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for likeness is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlaɪknəs/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,608 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 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 likeness, with forms such as "ilkeness", "liekness", and "likeenss". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "lioness", "lifeless", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English liknesse, from Old English līcness, ġelīcnes (“the quality of being like or equal; likeness; image; copy; pattern; example; parable”), from Proto-West Germanic *galīkanassī (“likeness”), equivalent to like + -ness. Cognate with West Fris… 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 likeness, spelled L-I-K-E-N-E-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.