meritorious

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for meritorious is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌmɛɹɪˈtɔɹi.əs/. Corpus data places it at rank #29,738 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Deserving of merit or commendation; deserving reward.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for meritorious, with forms such as "emritorious", "meirtorious", and "meriotrious". 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 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 Middle English meritorious, borrowed between 1375 and 1425 from Latin meritōrius (“earning money”), from meritus, past participle of mereō (“to earn”). 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 meritorious, spelled M-E-R-I-T-O-R-I-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.