lisbon

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Lisbon is 6 letters long, classified as aname, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlɪzbən/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,272 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 Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for Lisbon, with forms such as "ilsbon", "libson", and "lisbbon". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "listen", "Liston", "lion", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: As the capital of Portugal, from French Lisbonne, from Arabic لِشْبُونَة (lišbūna), from Latin Olisīpō, the origin of which is uncertain. Older spellings include Ulixbona and Ulixbuna (in the Visigothic era); Ὀλισσιπών (Olissipṓn) or Ὀλισσιπόνα (Olissipóna)… 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 Lisbon, spelled L-I-S-B-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.