superstition

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for superstition is 12 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌs(j)uː.pə(ɹ)ˈstɪ.ʃən/. Corpus data places it at rank #22,236 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 19 documented wrong-spelling variants for superstition, with forms such as "spuerstition", "ssuperstition", and "sueprstition". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "superstitious", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle French superstition, from Latin superstitio (“superstition”), from superstāre (“to stand above, to stand upon, to survive”) + -tiō (“-tion: forming nouns”), from super- (“above, over, upon”) + stāre (“to stand”). 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 superstition, spelled S-U-P-E-R-S-T-I-T-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.