receive

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for receive is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹɪˈsiːv/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,496 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for receive, with forms such as "erceive", "rceeive", and "recceive". 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, "reeve", "recipe", "revive", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English receyven, from Old French receivre, from Latin recipere (“take back, accept, etc.”), from re- (“back”) + capiō (“to take”); see capacious. Compare conceive, deceive, perceive. Displaced native Middle English terms in -fon/-fangen (e.g. a… 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 receive, spelled R-E-C-E-I-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.