parabola

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for parabola is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pəˈɹæbələ/. Corpus data places it at rank #60,342 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No misspelling variants are generated for parabola in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from New Latin parabola, from Ancient Greek παραβολή (parabolḗ), from παραβάλλω (parabállō, “I set side by side”), from παρά (pará, “beside”) + βάλλω (bállō, “I throw”). Doublet of parable, parole, and palaver. 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 parabola, spelled P-A-R-A-B-O-L-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.