swear

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for swear is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈswɛə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,968 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.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 swear, with forms such as "sewar", "sswear", and "swaer". 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, "sweet", "sweat", "sweep", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sweren, swerien, from Old English swerian (“to swear, take an oath of office”), from Proto-West Germanic *swarjan, from Proto-Germanic *swarjaną (“to speak, swear”), from Proto-Indo-European *swer- (“to swear”). Cognate with West Frisian… 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 swear, spelled S-W-E-A-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.