please

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for please is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pliːz/. Corpus data places it at rank #208 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 2 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 please, with forms such as "lpease", "pelase", and "plaese". 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 19 confusable-pair relationships, "plebs", "pledge", "pleased", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English plesen, plaisen, borrowed from Old French plaise, conjugated form of plaisir or plaire, from Latin placeō (“to please, to seem good”), from the Proto-Indo-European *pleHk- (“pleasingness, permission”). In this sense, displaced native Old… 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 please, spelled P-L-E-A-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.