sequence

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sequence is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsiː.kwəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,982 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for sequence, with forms such as "esquence", "seqeunce", and "seqquence". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "sequencer", "sentence", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sequence, from Old French sequence (“a sequence of cards, answering verses”), from Late Latin sequentia (“a following”), from Latin sequēns (“following”), from sequī (“to follow”); see sequent. 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 sequence, spelled S-E-Q-U-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.