spirit

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for spirit is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈspɪɹɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,704 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 14 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for spirit, with forms such as "psirit", "siprit", and "spiirt". 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 16 confusable-pair relationships, "spit", "sport", "split", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English spirit, from Old French espirit (“spirit”), from Latin spīritus (“breath; spirit”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)peys- (“to blow, breathe”). Compare inspire, respire, transpire, all ultimately from Latin spīrō (“to breathe, blow, respire… 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 spirit, spelled S-P-I-R-I-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.