people

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for people is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpi.pəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #66 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 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 people, with forms such as "epople", "peolpe", and "peopel". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "pope", "pole", "Pepe", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English puple, peple, peeple, from Anglo-Norman people, from Old French pueple, peuple, pople, from Latin populus (“a people, nation”), from Old Latin populus, from earlier poplus, from even earlier poplos, from Proto-Italic *poplos (“army”) of … 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 people, spelled P-E-O-P-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.