quince

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for quince is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kwɪns/. Corpus data places it at rank #34,657 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for quince, with forms such as "qiunce", "qquince", and "quicne". 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 9 confusable-pair relationships, "quite", "Quinn", "quint", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English quynce, coince, a variant of coins, coin (“quince”), from Old French cooing (modern coing), from Late Latin cotōneum, from Latin mālum cotōneum, a variant of mālum Cydonium (“Cydonian apple”), translating Ancient Greek μηλοκυδώνιον (mēlo… 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 quince, spelled Q-U-I-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.