obscene

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for obscene is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əbˈsiːn/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,870 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for obscene, with forms such as "boscene", "obbscene", and "obcsene". 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, "obscure", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French obscene (modern French obscène (“indecent, obscene”)), and from its etymon Latin obscēnus, obscaenus (“inauspicious; ominous; disgusting, filthy; offensive, repulsive; indecent, lewd, obscene”). The further etymology is uncertain, but may… 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 obscene, spelled O-B-S-C-E-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.