sentence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sentence is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɛn.təns/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,599 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for sentence, with forms such as "esntence", "senetnce", and "senntence". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "sequence", "sentences", "sentenced", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Middle French sentence, from Latin sententia (“way of thinking, opinion, sentiment”), from sentiēns, present participle of sentiō (“to feel, think”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *sent- (“to feel”). 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 sentence, spelled S-E-N-T-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.