obligation

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for obligation is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌɒb.lɪˈɡeɪ.ʃn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,390 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for obligation, with forms such as "boligation", "obbligation", and "obilgation". 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, "obligations", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English obligacioun, from Old French obligacion, from Latin obligatio, obligationem, from obligatum (past participle of obligare), from ob- (“to”) + ligare (“to bind”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyǵ- (“to bind”). 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 obligation, spelled O-B-L-I-G-A-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.