sexual selection

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sexual selection is 16 letters long, classified as a noun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A type of natural selection where members of the sexes acquire distinct forms either because the members of one sex choose mates with particular features or because in the competition for mates amo...".

No misspelling variants are generated for sexual selection in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Coined by Charles Darwin in his work The Descent of Man (1871). 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 sexual selection, spelled S-E-X-U-A-L- -S-E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.