significant

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for significant is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sɪɡˈnɪf.ɪ.kənt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,129 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 17 documented wrong-spelling variants for significant, with forms such as "isgnificant", "sginificant", and "siggnificant". 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, "significantly", "significance", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin significans, present participle of significare, from signum (“sign”) + ficare (“do, make”), variant of facere. 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 significant, spelled S-I-G-N-I-F-I-C-A-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.