slander

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for slander is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈslɑːndə/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,695 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A false or unsupported, malicious statement (spoken, not written), especially one which is injurious to a person's reputation; the making of such a statement.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for slander, with forms such as "lsander", "salnder", and "sladner". 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, "slater", "slayer", "slider", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English slaundre, sclaundre, from Old French esclandre, from Ecclesiastical Latin scandalum (“stumbling block, temptation”), from Ancient Greek σκάνδαλον (skándalon, “scandal”). Doublet of scandal. 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 slander, spelled S-L-A-N-D-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.