position

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for position is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pəˈzɪʃ.ən/. Corpus data places it at rank #624 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for position, with forms such as "opsition", "poistion", and "posiiton". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "potion", "positive", "positron", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English posicioun, from Old French posicion, from Latin positiō (“a putting, position”), from positus (“placed, situated”), past participle of pōnō (“to place”); see ponent. Compare apposition, composition, deposition; see pose. 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 position, spelled P-O-S-I-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.