onion

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for onion is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈʌn.jən/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,464 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for onion, with forms such as "noion", "oinon", and "onino". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "ono", "onto", "Oxon", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English onyoun, oynoun, from Old French oignon, from Latin ūniōnem, accusative of ūniō (“onion”), which had also been borrowed into Old English as yne, ynnelēac (“onion”) (> Middle English hynne-leac, henne-leac). Also displaced Middle English k… 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 onion, spelled O-N-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.