mental

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mental is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛn.təl/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,565 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for mental, with forms such as "emntal", "menatl", and "menntal". 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 17 confusable-pair relationships, "metal", "metals", "mentor", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowing from Middle French mental, from Late Latin mentālis, from mēns (“mind, disposition; heart, soul”) + -ālis (“-al”, adjectival suffix). 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 mental, spelled M-E-N-T-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.