paragon

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for paragon is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpæɹəɡən/. Corpus data places it at rank #27,239 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.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 paragon, with forms such as "apragon", "paargon", and "paraggon". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "pardon", "parton", "parson", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Anglo-Norman paragone, peragone, Middle French paragon, from Italian paragone (“comparison”) or Spanish parangón, from Byzantine Greek παρακόνη (parakónē, “whetstone”), from Ancient Greek παρακονάω (parakonáō, “I sharpen, whet”), from παρά (pará) + ἀκό… 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 paragon, spelled P-A-R-A-G-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.