syntax

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for syntax is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɪn.tæks/. Corpus data places it at rank #14,432 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 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for syntax, with forms such as "snytax", "ssyntax", and "synatx". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "synth", "Santa", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Partly from Late Latin syntaxis and partly from its etymon, Ancient Greek σύνταξις (súntaxis), from σύν (sún, “together”) + τάξις (táxis, “arrangement”), from τάσσω (tássō, “I arrange”). Doublet of syntaxis. 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 syntax, spelled S-Y-N-T-A-X, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.