potable

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for potable is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpəʊtəbəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #35,887 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Good for drinking without fear of waterborne disease or poisoning.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for potable, with forms such as "optable", "poatble", and "potabble". 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, "pothole", "probable", "payable", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: The adjective is derived from Late Middle English potable (“drinkable, potable”), from Middle French, Old French potable (modern French potable (“drinkable, potable”)), and from its etymon Late Latin pōtābilis (“drinkable, potable”), from Latin pōtāre (“to … 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 potable, spelled P-O-T-A-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.