personal

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for personal is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɜː.sə.nəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #640 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for personal, with forms such as "eprsonal", "perosnal", and "perrsonal". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "persons", "personnel", "personals", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English personal, personele, from Anglo-Norman personel, personal, personell, Old French personal, personel, from Late Latin persōnālis (“of a person, personly”), equivalent to person + -al. Doublet of personnel. 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 personal, spelled P-E-R-S-O-N-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.