masochism

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for masochism is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmæs.ə.kɪ.zəm/. Corpus data places it at rank #58,180 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The (often sexual) enjoyment of receiving pain or humiliation.".

No misspelling variants are generated for masochism 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 German Masochismus, coined alongside Sadismus in 1886 by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. Named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel "Venus in Furs" explores a sadomasochistic relationship, + -ism. 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 masochism, spelled M-A-S-O-C-H-I-S-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.