sense

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sense is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sɛns/. Corpus data places it at rank #665 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for sense, with forms such as "esnse", "senes", and "sennse". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ses", "SSE", "SNS", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sense, from Old French sens, sen, san (“sense, perception, direction”); partly from Latin sēnsus (“sensation, feeling, meaning”), from sentiō (“feel, perceive”); partly of Germanic origin (whence also Occitan sen, Italian senno), from Vu… 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 sense, spelled S-E-N-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.