personable

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for personable is 10 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɜːsn̩əbl/. Corpus data places it at rank #42,332 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 16 documented wrong-spelling variants for personable, with forms such as "eprsonable", "perosnable", and "perrsonable". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "personal", "personals", "personally", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Late Middle English personable, personabil (“having a pleasing appearance, handsome”), and then from both of the following: * For sense 1 (“having a pleasing appearance”) and sense 2 (“having a pleasant manner”) (these senses are not found in Old Frenc… 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 personable, spelled P-E-R-S-O-N-A-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.