mime

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mime is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /maɪm/. Corpus data places it at rank #26,885 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for mime, with forms such as "imme", "miem", and "mimme". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "MM", "mom", "mix", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Possibly from Middle English *mime, from Old English mīma (“a buffoon, jester, mime”), from Latin mimus, from Ancient Greek μῖμος (mîmos, “imitator, actor”), but more likely re-borrowed in modern times from French mime (“mimic actor”), from the same source. 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 mime, spelled M-I-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.