melancholy

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for melancholy is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛlənkəli/. Corpus data places it at rank #17,414 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 16 documented wrong-spelling variants for melancholy, with forms such as "emlancholy", "mealncholy", and "melacnholy". 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, "melancholic", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English malencolie, from Old French melancolie, from Ancient Greek μελαγχολία (melankholía, “atrabiliousness”), from μέλας (mélas), μελαν- (melan-, “black, dark, murky”) + χολή (kholḗ, “bile”). Compare the Latin ātra bīlis (“black bile”). The ad… 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 melancholy, spelled M-E-L-A-N-C-H-O-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.