success

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for success is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /səkˈsɛs/. Corpus data places it at rank #935 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for success, with forms such as "scucess", "ssuccess", and "succes". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "successor", "succeed", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Latin successus, from succēdō (“succeed”), from sub- (“next to”) + cēdō (“go, move”). Partly displaced native Old English spēd, whence Modern English speed. 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 success, spelled S-U-C-C-E-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.