lithium

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lithium is 7 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlɪθi.əm/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,750 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 10 likely wrong-spelling variants for lithium, with forms such as "ilthium", "lihtium", and "lithhium". 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 New Latin lithium, from Ancient Greek λίθος (líthos, “stone”) + -ium. 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 lithium, spelled L-I-T-H-I-U-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.