paycheck

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for paycheck is 8 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpeɪ.t͡ʃɛk/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,021 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A periodic payment, usually in the form of a paper check, received by an employee from an employer for work performed.".

Our generated misspelling index lists 13 likely wrong-spelling variants for paycheck, with forms such as "apycheck", "pacyheck", and "payccheck". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. 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: From pay (“wages or salary”) + check (“means of payment”). 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 paycheck, spelled P-A-Y-C-H-E-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.