reception

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for reception is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹɪˈsɛp.ʃn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,885 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for reception, with forms such as "erception", "rceeption", and "recception". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "receptor", "rejection", "recession", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English recepcion, reception, from Middle French reception, from Latin receptiōn- (“the act of receiving; reception”), from recipiō (“receive”), from re- (“back”) + capiō (“to hold”). Equivalent to receive + -tion. 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 reception, spelled R-E-C-E-P-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.