sing

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sing is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,810 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.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 sing, with forms such as "isng", "singg", and "sinng". 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 singen, from Old English singan (“to sing”), from Proto-West Germanic *singwan, from Proto-Germanic *singwaną (“to sing”), from Proto-Indo-European *sengʷʰ- (“to recite, sing”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian sjunge (“to sing”), West Fri… 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 sing, spelled S-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.