pique

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for pique is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /piːk/. Corpus data places it at rank #31,706 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for pique, with forms such as "ipque", "piqeu", and "piqque". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "pixie", "plaque", "piqued", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: The verb is borrowed from French piquer (“to prick, sting; to anger, annoy; (reflexive) to get angry; to provoke, stimulate; (reflexive) to boast about”), from Middle French piquer, picquer (“to prick, sting; to anger, annoy; (reflexive) to get angry”), fro… 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 pique, spelled P-I-Q-U-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.