obedient

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for obedient is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈbiːdɪənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #22,754 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Willing to comply with the commands, orders, or instructions of those in authority; biddable.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for obedient, with forms such as "boedient", "obbedient", and "obdeient". 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, "obedience", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English obedient, from Old French obedient, from Latin oboediēns, present active participle of oboediō (“obey”). 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 obedient, spelled O-B-E-D-I-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.