plague

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for plague is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pleɪɡ/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,468 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 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 plague, with forms such as "lpague", "palgue", and "plageu". 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 9 confusable-pair relationships, "plane", "plate", "plaque", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English plage, borrowed from Old French plage, from Latin plāga (“blow, wound”), from plangō (“to strike”). Cognate with Middle Dutch plāghe (> Dutch plaag), plāghen (> Dutch plagen); Middle Low German plāge; Middle High German plāge, pflāge (> … 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 plague, spelled P-L-A-G-U-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.