slippery

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for slippery is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈslɪpəɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #12,860 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for slippery, with forms such as "lsippery", "silppery", and "slipepry". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "slipped", "skipper", "slipper", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English slipperie, an extended form ( + -y) of Middle English slipper, sliper (“slippery”), from Old English slipor (“slippery”), from Proto-Germanic *slipraz (“smooth, slippery”), equivalent to slip + -er. Compare also Middle English slibbri, s… 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 slippery, spelled S-L-I-P-P-E-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.