still

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for still is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /stɪl/. Corpus data places it at rank #127 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 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 still, with forms such as "sitll", "sstill", and "stil". 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, "stir", "style", "stole", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English stille (“motionless, stationary”), from Old English stille (“still, quiet”), from Proto-West Germanic *stillī, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)telH- (“to be silent; to be still”). Cognate with Scots stil (“still”), Saterland Frisian stil (“… 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 still, spelled S-T-I-L-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.