particular

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for particular is 10 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pəˈtɪk.jʊ.lə/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,092 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for particular, with forms such as "aprticular", "paritcular", and "parrticular". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "particulars", "particulate", "particularly", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English particuler, from Anglo-Norman particuler, Middle French particuler, particulier, from Late Latin particularis (“partial; separate, individual”), from Latin particula (“(small) part”). Equivalent to particle + -ar. Compare particle. 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 particular, spelled P-A-R-T-I-C-U-L-A-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.