peruse

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for peruse is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pəˈɹuːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #40,385 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 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for peruse, with forms such as "epruse", "perruse", and "persue". 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 15 confusable-pair relationships, "purse", "prose", "prune", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From either Medieval Latin perūtor, perūsitō (“wear out”)) or Anglo-Norman peruser (“use up”)), originally leading to two concurrent meanings, but only those derived from "to examine" survive today. By surface analysis, per- + use. 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 peruse, spelled P-E-R-U-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.