syllable

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for syllable is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɪl.ə.bəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #19,224 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 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for syllable, with forms such as "slylable", "ssyllable", and "sylable". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "syllabus", "syllables", "scalable", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English syllable, sillable, syllabylle, sylabul, from Anglo-Norman sillable, from Old French sillebe, from Latin syllaba, from Ancient Greek συλλαβή (sullabḗ), from συλλαμβάνω (sullambánō, “to gather together”), from συν- (sun-, “together”) + λα… 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 syllable, spelled S-Y-L-L-A-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.