oblige

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for oblige is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈblaɪd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #25,505 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for oblige, with forms such as "bolige", "obblige", and "obilge". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "olive", "ollie", "online", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English obligen, from Old French obligier, obliger, from Latin obligō, obligāre, from ob- + ligō. Doublet of obligate, taken straight from Latin. 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 oblige, spelled O-B-L-I-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.