single

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for single is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɪŋɡl̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #380 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for single, with forms such as "isngle", "signle", and "singel". 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 18 confusable-pair relationships, "sings", "sizzle", "singly", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English single, sengle, from Old French sengle, saingle, sangle, from Latin singulus, a diminutive derived from Proto-Indo-European *sem- (“one”). Akin to Latin simplex (“simple”). See simple, and compare singular. 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 single, spelled S-I-N-G-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.