severe

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for severe is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sɪˈvɪə/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,701 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for severe, with forms such as "esvere", "seevre", and "seveer". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "sewer", "sphere", "Severn", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French, from Latin severus (“severe, serious, grave in demeanor”). 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 severe, spelled S-E-V-E-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.