painful

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for painful is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpeɪn.fl̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,179 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 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for painful, with forms such as "apinful", "paifnul", and "painfful". 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, "painfully", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English paynful, peinful, peynful, paynefull, peynefull, equivalent to pain + -ful. Compare Danish pinefuld (“painful”). 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 painful, spelled P-A-I-N-F-U-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.