peasant

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for peasant is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɛzənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,653 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 peasant, with forms such as "epasant", "paesant", and "peaasnt". 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, "pendant", "pennant", "pleasant", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Late Middle English paissaunt, from Anglo-Norman paisant, from Old French païsant, païsan (“countryman, peasant”), from païs (“country”), from Latin pāgus (“countryside”) + Old French -enc (“member of”), from Frankish -inc, -ing "-ing"; which was an al… 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 peasant, spelled P-E-A-S-A-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.