seven

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for seven is 5 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɛvən/. Corpus data places it at rank #884 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A numerical value equal to 7; the number following six and preceding eight. This many dots: (•••••••). Describing a group or set with seven elements.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for seven, with forms such as "esven", "seevn", and "sevenn". 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, "Shen", "Sven", "sewn", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *septḿ̥ From Middle English seven, from Old English seofon (“seven”), from Proto-West Germanic *sebun (“seven”), from Proto-Germanic *sebun (“seven”), from Proto-Indo-European *septḿ̥ (“seven”). Cognate with Scots seiven (“seven”), West Frisian sâ… 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 seven, spelled S-E-V-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.