sympathy

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sympathy is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɪm.pəθ.i/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,067 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 14 documented wrong-spelling variants for sympathy, with forms such as "smypathy", "ssympathy", and "symapthy". 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: Borrowed from Middle French sympathie, from Late Latin sympathīa (“feeling in common”), from Ancient Greek σῠμπᾰ́θειᾰ (sŭmpắtheiă, “fellow feeling”), from σῠμπᾰθής (sŭmpăthḗs, “affected by like feelings; exerting mutual influence, interacting”) + -ῐᾰ (-ĭă, … 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 sympathy, spelled S-Y-M-P-A-T-H-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.