meticulous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for meticulous is 10 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /mɪˈtɪkjɪlɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,284 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 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for meticulous, with forms such as "emticulous", "meitculous", and "metciulous". 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, "meticulously", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Latin meticulōsus (“full of fear, timid, fearful, terrible, frightful”), from metus (“fear”) and -culōsus, extracted from perīculōsus (“perilous”). Sense of “characterized by very precise, conscientious attention to details” is a sema… 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 meticulous, spelled M-E-T-I-C-U-L-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.