nervous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for nervous is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈnɜːvəs/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,513 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for nervous, with forms such as "enrvous", "nerovus", and "nerrvous". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "nervously", "nerves", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English nervous (“composed of or incorporating nerves”), from Latin nervōsus (“nervous; sinewy; energetic, vigorous”), from nervus (“nerve; muscle; sinew, tendon; (figuratively) energy, power; nerve; force, strength, vigour”) (ultimately from Pr… 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 nervous, spelled N-E-R-V-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.