superlative

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for superlative is 11 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /suːˈpɜː.lə.tɪv/. Corpus data places it at rank #37,719 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 16 documented wrong-spelling variants for superlative, with forms such as "spuerlative", "ssuperlative", and "sueprlative". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English superlatyf, from Old French superlatif, from Late Latin superlātīvus, from Latin superlātus (“carried above, over; extravagant, of hyperbole”), past participle of superfero (“carry over”), from super (“above”) + fero (“bear, carry”). 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 superlative, spelled S-U-P-E-R-L-A-T-I-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.