perjury

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for perjury is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɜː(ɹ)d͡ʒəɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #19,415 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The deliberate giving of false or misleading testimony under oath.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for perjury, with forms such as "eprjury", "pejrury", and "perjjury". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "perry", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Anglo-Norman perjurie, from Latin perjūrāre (“swear falsely”), from per- + jūrāre. Displaced native Old English mānāþ (literally “false oath”). 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 perjury, spelled P-E-R-J-U-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.