sacrilege

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sacrilege is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsækɹɪlɪd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #45,064 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Desecration, profanation, misuse or violation of something regarded as sacred.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for sacrilege, with forms such as "ascrilege", "saccrilege", and "sacirlege". 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: Circa 1300, original sense “stealing something sacred”. From Middle English sacrilege, from Old French sacrilege, from Latin sacrilegium, from sacrilegus (“sacrilegious”). Sense of “profanation” from late 14th century. 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 sacrilege, spelled S-A-C-R-I-L-E-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.