perish

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for perish is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɛɹ.ɪʃ/. Corpus data places it at rank #19,162 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 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for perish, with forms such as "eprish", "peirsh", and "perihs". 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, "pers", "Perth", "prism", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English perishen, borrowed from Old French perir (via the stem periss- used in various conjugations), from Latin perīre (“pass away, perish”), from per (“through”) + īre (“pass, go”). 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 perish, spelled P-E-R-I-S-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.