temper

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for temper is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtɛmpə/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,551 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for temper, with forms such as "etmper", "temepr", and "temmper". 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, "tempo", "timer", "tempt", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English temperen, tempren, from Old English ġetemprian, temprian, borrowed from Latin temperō (“I divide or proportion duly, I moderate, I regulate; intransitive senses I am moderate, I am temperate”), from tempus (“time, fit season”). Compare a… 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 temper, spelled T-E-M-P-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.