resist

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for resist is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹɪˈzɪst/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,163 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 resist, with forms such as "ersist", "reisst", and "resisst". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "rest", "rests", "Revis", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English resisten, from Middle French resister and Old French resistre, and their source, Latin resistere, from re- + sistere (“cause to stand”). 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 resist, spelled R-E-S-I-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.