manticore

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for manticore is 9 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmæntɪˌkɔɹ/. Corpus data places it at rank #70,871 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A beast with the body of a lion (usually red), the tail of a scorpion, and the head/face of a man with a mouth filled with multiple rows of sharp teeth (like a shark), said to be able to shoot spik...".

No misspelling variants are generated for manticore in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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 Latin mantichōras, from Ancient Greek μαρτιχόρας (martikhóras, “man-eater; tiger”), from Old Persian *martyahvārah (“man-eater”), from 𐎶𐎼𐎫𐎡𐎹 (m-r-t-i-y /⁠martyaʰ⁠/, “man”). 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 manticore, spelled M-A-N-T-I-C-O-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.