shelled
/ʃɛld/
"shelled" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“shelled” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #26,244 in English word frequency and used as a verb.
- #26,244
- frequency rank, English
- 7
- letters
- 9
- tracked misspellings
- 13
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - simple past and past participle of shell
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | shelled |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ʃɛld/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #26,244 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 13 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “shelled” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for shelled is 7 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃɛld/. Corpus data places it at rank #26,244 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "simple past and past participle of shell".
Our generated misspelling index lists 9 likely wrong-spelling variants for shelled, with forms such as "hselled", "sehlled", and "sheled". Each of these forms differs from the correct spelling by one small edit: a doubled letter, a dropped silent letter, or a substituted vowel. It also participates in 13 confusable-pair relationships, "shells", "shelly", "shelter", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is shelled, spelled S-H-E-L-L-E-D.
Definition
- 1simple past and past participle of shell
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hselled,sehlled,sheled,sheleld,shellde,shelledd,shhelled,shleled,sshelled
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of shelled - expressed in single-character edits (insert, delete, or swap one letter). Bigger bars stand out at a glance; a one-edit slip is the hardest to catch.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “shelled”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is S-H-E-L-L-E-D - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ʃɛld/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “shells” - see the side-by-side comparison. shelled vs shells
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.