perilous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for perilous is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɛɹ.ɪ.ləs/. Corpus data places it at rank #23,060 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Dangerous, full of peril.".

Our generated misspelling index lists 11 likely wrong-spelling variants for perilous, with forms such as "eprilous", "peirlous", and "perillous". 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 also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "perils", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English perilous, from Old French perilleus, equivalent to peril + -ous, from the noun peril, or from Latin perīculōsus. Doublet of periculous. 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 perilous, spelled P-E-R-I-L-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.