really

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for really is 6 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɹɪə.li/. Corpus data places it at rank #113 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for really, with forms such as "erally", "raelly", and "reallyy". 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 15 confusable-pair relationships, "rely", "reply", "realm", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English really, realy, rialliche, equivalent to real + -ly. 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 really, spelled R-E-A-L-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.