maiden

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for maiden is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmeɪdən/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,359 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for maiden, with forms such as "amiden", "madien", and "maidden". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "main", "Maine", "maize", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English mayden, meiden, from Old English mæġden (“girl”), originally a diminutive of mæġeþ (“girl”) via diminutive suffix -en, from Proto-West Germanic *magaþ, from Proto-Germanic *magaþs. Equivalent to maid + -en. 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 maiden, spelled M-A-I-D-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.