melissa

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for melissa is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /məˈlɪsə/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,066 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A plant of the genus Melissa, especially lemon balm (Melissa officinalis), often used medicinally.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for melissa, with forms such as "emlissa", "meilssa", and "melisa". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "missa", "Melinda", "Marissa", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Late Latin melissa, from Ancient Greek μέλισσα (mélissa, “bee”), because the plant attracts bees. 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 melissa, spelled M-E-L-I-S-S-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.