tennis

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for tennis is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtɛnɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,986 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for tennis, with forms such as "etnnis", "tenins", and "tenis". 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 9 confusable-pair relationships, "tens", "tents", "Tunis", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English tennys, teneys, tenis, from Old French tenez (second-person plural imperative of tenir (“to hold”)). 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 tennis, spelled T-E-N-N-I-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.