ravine

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ravine is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹəˈviːn/. Corpus data places it at rank #23,965 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A deep narrow valley or gorge in the earth's surface worn by running water.".

Our generated misspelling index lists 8 likely wrong-spelling variants for ravine, with forms such as "arvine", "raivne", and "ravien". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Rhine", "revive", "revise", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French ravin (“a gully”), from Old French raviner (“to pillage, sweep down, cascade”), from ravine (“robbery, rapine; violent rush of water, waterfall, avalanche; impetuosity, spirit”), from Latin rapīna (cf. rapine). 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 ravine, spelled R-A-V-I-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.