spillway
"spillway" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“spillway” has 11 generated spelling variants in the English index at frequency #40,899. The variants make it a useful spelling check.
- #40,899
- frequency rank, English
- 54,294
- “S” headwords
- 11
- tracked misspellings
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A path designed to take away overflow safely.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | spillway |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #40,899 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “spillway” sits in English frequency
A misspelling magnet
The generator records 11 spelling variants around spillway, anoun. Corpus frequency is #40,899 among 54,294 “S” headwords. Dominant gloss: "A path designed to take away overflow safely.".
Our generated misspelling index lists 11 likely wrong-spelling variants for spillway, with forms such as "psillway", "sipllway", and "spillawy". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
Etymologically, the entry records: From spill + way. The correct English form is spillway, spelled S-P-I-L-L-W-A-Y.
Definition
- 1A path designed to take away overflow safely.
Etymology
From spill + way.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as:
- psillway
- sipllway
- spillawy
- spillwayy
- spillwway
- spillwya
- spilway
- spilwlay
- splilway
- sppillway
- sspillway
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of spillway - counted as single-character edits (an insertion, a deletion, or a substituted letter). The larger the bar, the easier the typo is to spot; one-edit slips are the ones that sneak past readers.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "spillway"?
What does "spillway" mean?
What are common misspellings of "spillway"?
What is the origin of the word "spillway"?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Using “spillway”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is S-P-I-L-L-W-A-Y - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Same frequency band
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.