seventeen

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for seventeen is 9 letters long, classified as anum, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɛv.ən.tiːn/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,726 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The cardinal number occurring after sixteen and before eighteen, represented in Roman numerals as XVII and in Arabic numerals as 17.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for seventeen, with forms such as "esventeen", "seevnteen", and "seveneten". 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, "seventies", "seventeenth", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English seventene, from Old English seofontīene, from Proto-Germanic *sebuntehun. Cognate with Dutch zeventien, West Frisian santjin, German siebzehn, Danish sytten. Equivalent to seven + -teen 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 seventeen, spelled S-E-V-E-N-T-E-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.