righteous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for righteous is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɹaɪt͡ʃəs/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,663 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for righteous, with forms such as "irghteous", "rgihteous", and "rigghteous". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From earlier rightuous, rightwose, rightwos, rightwise, from Middle English rightwise, rightwis, from Old English rihtwīs (“righteous, just”), corresponding to right + -wise (with assimilation of second element to -ous), or to right + wise (“way, manner”). … 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 righteous, spelled R-I-G-H-T-E-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.