reverence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for reverence is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɹɛv.ə.ɹəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,915 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for reverence, with forms such as "erverence", "reevrence", and "reveernce". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "reverend", "reference", "references", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English reverence (noun) and reverencen (verb), from Old French reverence and Latin reverentia, from Latin revereor (“I stand in awe, respect, revere”), from re- + vereor, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wer- (“to cover, heed, notice”). 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 reverence, spelled R-E-V-E-R-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.