nine

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for nine is 4 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /naɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,431 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 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 nine, with forms such as "inne", "nien", and "ninne". 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, "NN", "non", "nun", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *h₁néwn̥ From Middle English nyn, nyne, from Old English nigon (“nine”), from Proto-West Germanic *neun, from Proto-Germanic *newun (“nine”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁néwn̥ (“nine”). Cognate with Scots neen, nine (“nine”), Saterland Frisian njú… 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 nine, spelled N-I-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.