religion

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for religion is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹɪˈlɪd͡ʒ.ən/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,877 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for religion, with forms such as "erligion", "reilgion", and "relgiion". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "revision", "religious", "religions", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English religioun, from Old French religion, from Latin religiō (“scrupulousness, pious misgivings, superstition, conscientiousness, sanctity, an object of veneration, cult-observance, reverence”). Most likely from the Proto-Indo-European *h₂leg… 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 religion, spelled R-E-L-I-G-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.