responsible

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for responsible is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹɪˈspɒn.sə.bəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,407 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 18 documented wrong-spelling variants for responsible, with forms such as "ersponsible", "repsonsible", and "resopnsible". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "responsive", "responsibly", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French responsable, from Old French responsable, responsible, formed from the root of Latin responsus, from respondere. The spelling of the English word is taken from the Old French variant responsible. By surface analysis, response + -ible. 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 responsible, spelled R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.