robbery

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for robbery is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɹɒbəɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,493 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 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 robbery, with forms such as "orbbery", "rbobery", and "robberry". 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 9 confusable-pair relationships, "Robby", "Robert", "rubber", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English robberie, robry, roberie, from Old French roberie, from the verb rober (“to steal; to pillage”) + -ie. Ultimately from unattested Frankish *raubōn. By surface analysis, rob + -ery. Compare Dutch roverij (“robbery”), Norwegian Bokmål røve… 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 robbery, spelled R-O-B-B-E-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.