possibility

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for possibility is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌpɒs.ɪˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,589 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for possibility, with forms such as "opssibility", "posibility", and "posisbility". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English possibilite, from Middle French possibilité (from Old French possibilite) and directly from Late Latin possibilitās (“possibility”), from Latin possibilis (“possible”); see possible. By surface analysis, possible + -ity. 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 possibility, spelled P-O-S-S-I-B-I-L-I-T-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.