rescue

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for rescue is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɹɛs.kjuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,131 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 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for rescue, with forms such as "erscue", "recsue", and "resccue". 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 11 confusable-pair relationships, "revue", "reside", "roscoe", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English rescouen, from Old French rescoure, rescurre, rescorre; from Latin prefix re- (“re-”) + excutere (“to shake or drive out”), from ex (“out”) + quatiō (“to shake”). 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 rescue, spelled R-E-S-C-U-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.