passage

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for passage is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpæsɪd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,547 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for passage, with forms such as "apssage", "pasage", and "pasasge". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "passive", "postage", "Passaic", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed into Middle English from Old French passage, from passer (“to pass”). 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 passage, spelled P-A-S-S-A-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.