territorial waters
"territorial-waters" is a 17-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“territorial waters” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 18
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A country's inland lakes and waterways as well as the portion of its coastal oceans, seas, or other adjoining bodies of water considered to fall within the political boundaries and legal jurisdicti...
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | territorial waters |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 18 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “territorial waters” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
territorial waters is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A country's inland lakes and waterways as well as the portion of its coastal oceans, seas, or other adjoining bodies of water considered to fall within the political boundaries and legal jurisdicti...".
territorial waters doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is territorial waters, spelled T-E-R-R-I-T-O-R-I-A-L- -W-A-T-E-R-S.
Definition
- 1A country's inland lakes and waterways as well as the portion of its coastal oceans, seas, or other adjoining bodies of water considered to fall within the political boundaries and legal jurisdiction of that country.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “territorial waters”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is T-E-R-R-I-T-O-R-I-A-L- -W-A-T-E-R-S - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.