program

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for program is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɹəʊ̯ˌɡɹæm/. Corpus data places it at rank #545 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for program, with forms such as "porgram", "pprogram", and "prgoram". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "programs", "programme", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French programme, from Late Latin programma (“a proclamation, edict”), from Ancient Greek πρόγραμμα (prógramma, “a written public notice, an edict”), from προγράφω (prográphō, “I set forth as a public notice”), from πρό (pró, “before”) + γράφω… 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 program, spelled P-R-O-G-R-A-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.