temperance

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for temperance is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtɛmpəɹəns/. Corpus data places it at rank #24,019 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 16 documented wrong-spelling variants for temperance, with forms such as "etmperance", "temeprance", and "temmperance". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "temperate", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Anglo-Norman temperance, from Latin temperantia (“moderation, sobriety, discretion, self-control”), from temperans, present participle of temperare (“to moderate”). See temper. English equivalent temper + -ance. 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 temperance, spelled T-E-M-P-E-R-A-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.