persona non grata

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for persona non grata is 17 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pə(ɹ)ˈsəʊnə nɒn ˈɡɹɑːtə/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A person who is not welcome, especially a diplomat in a foreign country.".

No misspelling variants are generated for persona non grata in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin persōna (“person”) + nōn (“not”) + grāta (from grātus (“acceptable”)). 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 non grata, spelled P-E-R-S-O-N-A- -N-O-N- -G-R-A-T-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.