sabotage

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sabotage is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsæ.bəˌtɑːʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,674 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A deliberate action aimed at weakening someone (or something, a nation, etc) or preventing them from being successful, through subversion, obstruction, disruption, and/or destruction.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for sabotage, with forms such as "asbotage", "sabbotage", and "saboatge". 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: Unadapted borrowing from French sabotage. 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 sabotage, spelled S-A-B-O-T-A-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.