saintly

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for saintly is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈseɪntli/. Corpus data places it at rank #42,395 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Like or characteristic of a saint; befitting a holy person; saintlike.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for saintly, with forms such as "asintly", "sainlty", and "sainntly". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "saints", "singly", "swiftly", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English *saintli (suggested by seyntly (adverb)), equivalent to saint + -ly. Compare saintlike. 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 saintly, spelled S-A-I-N-T-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.