prohibit

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for prohibit is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pɹəˈhɪbɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #14,817 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To forbid, disallow, or proscribe officially; to make illegal or illicit.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for prohibit, with forms such as "porhibit", "pprohibit", and "prhoibit". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "prohibited", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English prohibiten, from Latin prohibeō (“I fend off, prevent, prohibit”) (through past participle prohibitus). 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 prohibit, spelled P-R-O-H-I-B-I-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.