mediocre

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mediocre is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌmiːdɪˈəʊkə/. Corpus data places it at rank #14,587 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Not excellent or outstanding, usually disappointingly so.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for mediocre, with forms such as "emdiocre", "mdeiocre", and "meddiocre". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "medicare", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From the late Middle English medioker, from the French médiocre, from the Middle French médiocre, from the Classical Latin mediocris (“in a middle state”, “of middle size”, “middling”, “moderate”, “ordinary”, from medius (“middle”) + ocris (“rugged mountain… 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 mediocre, spelled M-E-D-I-O-C-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.