reflection

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for reflection is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹɪˈflɛkʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,447 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 16 documented wrong-spelling variants for reflection, with forms such as "erflection", "refelction", and "refflection". 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, "rejection", "reflector", "resection", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French reflexion, reflection, and its source Late Latin reflexio, from the participle stem of reflectō. The current spelling is influenced by reflect. Equivalent to reflect + -ion. 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 reflection, spelled R-E-F-L-E-C-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.