peking

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Peking is 6 letters long, classified as aname, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /piːˈkɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #23,058 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for Peking, with forms such as "epking", "peikng", and "pekign". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ping", "peng", "posing", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: c. 1655 romanization of the Nanking court dialect Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese 北京 (Běijīng), reinforced by Postal Romanization from before the modern palatalization of [k] to [t͡ɕ]. The early Portuguese and Jesuits such as Francis Xavier used the spell… 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 Peking, spelled P-E-K-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.