spill

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for spill is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spɪl/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,103 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for spill, with forms such as "psill", "sipll", and "spil". 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, "SPL", "spin", "spit", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English spillen, from Old English spillan, spildan (“to kill, destroy, waste”), from Proto-West Germanic *spilþijan, from Proto-Germanic *spilþijaną (“to spoil, kill, murder”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pel- (“to sunder, split, rend, tear”). … 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 spill, spelled S-P-I-L-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.