placate

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for placate is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pləˈkeɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #38,555 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To calm; to bring peace to; to influence someone who was furious to the point that they become content or at least no longer irate.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for placate, with forms such as "lpacate", "palcate", and "plaacte". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "place", "plate", "Platte", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in the late 17ᵗʰ century; borrowed from Latin plācātus, perfect passive participle of plācō (“appease, placate”, literally “smooth, smoothen”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix) and -ate (adjective-forming suffix) for more), ultimately thought t… 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 placate, spelled P-L-A-C-A-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.