peacock

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for peacock is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpikɑk/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,298 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 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 peacock, with forms such as "epacock", "paecock", and "peaccock". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "Pocock", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English pecok, pekok, pocok, pacok, equivalent to pea (“peafowl; peacock”) + cock. Compare Old Norse páfugl (“peacock”, literally “pea-fowl”), and English peahen, peachick, etc. 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 peacock, spelled P-E-A-C-O-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.