nulla pœna sine lege

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for nulla pœna sine lege is 20 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌnʌlə ˈpiːnə ˌsaɪni ˈliːdʒi/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The principle that a person shall receive no punishment unless he has committed an offence as explicitly defined in a law.".

No misspelling variants are generated for nulla pœna sine lege in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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 Latin: nūlla (feminine form of nūllus, “not any”) + poena (“penalty”, “punishment”) + sine (“without”) + lēge (ablative singular form of lēx, “a law”) = “no punishment without a law”. 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 nulla pœna sine lege, spelled N-U-L-L-A- -P-Œ-N-A- -S-I-N-E- -L-E-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.