obvious

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for obvious is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɑb.vi.əs/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,361 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Easily discovered, seen, or understood; self-explanatory.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for obvious, with forms such as "bovious", "obbvious", and "obivous". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "odious", "obviously", "oblivious", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: 16th century, from Latin obvius (“being in the way so as to meet, meeting, easy to access, at hand, ready, obvious”) + -ous, from ob- (“before”) + via (“way”). 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 obvious, spelled O-B-V-I-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.