mail

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mail is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /meɪl/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,952 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 4 documented wrong-spelling variants for mail, with forms such as "amil", "maill", and "mial". 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, "mi", "ML", "may", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English male, from Anglo-Norman male, Old French male (“bag, wallet”), from Frankish *malha (“bag”), from Proto-Germanic *malhō (“bag, pouch”), from Proto-Indo-European *molko- (“leather pouch”). Compare Dutch maal. 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 mail, spelled M-A-I-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.