parsley

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for parsley is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɑː(ɹ)sli/. Corpus data places it at rank #20,454 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for parsley, with forms such as "aprsley", "parlsey", and "parrsley". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "partly", "Presley", "parse", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English persely, from Old French peresil, from Latin petroselīnum, from Ancient Greek πετροσέλῑνον (petrosélīnon, “parsley”), from πέτρος (pétros, “rock, stone”) + σέλῑνον (sélīnon, “celery”). Displaced Old English petersiliġe, which goes back t… 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 parsley, spelled P-A-R-S-L-E-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.