painstaking

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for painstaking is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpeɪnˌsteɪkɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #31,690 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Carefully attentive to details; studious; diligent in performing a process or procedure.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 17 documented wrong-spelling variants for painstaking, with forms such as "apinstaking", "painnstaking", and "painsatking". 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, "painstakingly", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From pains + taking; see take pains. The /ˈpeɪnˌsteɪkɪŋ/ pronunciation which dominates in the United States suggests a reanalysis of the word as pain + staking. 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 painstaking, spelled P-A-I-N-S-T-A-K-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.