metaphor

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for metaphor is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛ.tə.fə/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,726 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 12 likely wrong-spelling variants for metaphor, with forms such as "emtaphor", "meatphor", and "metahpor". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, 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 French métaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Ancient Greek μεταφορά (metaphorá), from μεταφέρω (metaphérō, “I transfer, apply”), from μετά (metá, “with, across, after”) + φέρω (phérō, “I bear, carry”). 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 metaphor, spelled M-E-T-A-P-H-O-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.