persona

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for persona is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pɝˈsoʊnə/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,436 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 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for persona, with forms such as "eprsona", "perosna", and "perrsona". 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 9 confusable-pair relationships, "persons", "Pierson", "personal", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Latin persōna (“mask; character”), of uncertain origin. Suggested to be from Etruscan 𐌘𐌄𐌓𐌔𐌖 (φersu, “mask; masked individual; actor”), which could be a loan from Ancient Greek πρόσωπον (prósōpon, “face; appearance; mask used in ancient th… 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 persona, spelled P-E-R-S-O-N-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.