sink

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sink is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɪŋk/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,081 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 16 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 sink, with forms such as "isnk", "sinkk", and "sinnk". 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, "SK", "six", "son", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English synken, from Old English sincan, from Proto-West Germanic *sinkwan, from Proto-Germanic *sinkwaną, from Proto-Indo-European *sengʷ- (“to fall, sink”). Compare West Frisian sinke, Low German sinken, Dutch zinken, German sinken, Danish and… 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 sink, spelled S-I-N-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.