sign

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sign is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /saɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #885 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 13 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for sign, with forms such as "isgn", "sgin", and "siggn". 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, "six", "son", "sir", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English signe, sygne, syng, seine, sine, syne, from Old English seġn (“sign; mark; token”) and Old French signe, seing (“sign; mark; signature”); both from Latin signum (“a mark; sign; token”); root uncertain. Doublet of signum. Partially displa… 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 sign, spelled S-I-G-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.