topic

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for topic is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtɒpɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,093 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "topical".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for topic, with forms such as "otpic", "toipc", and "topci". 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, "tops", "tori", "toxic", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin topica, from Ancient Greek τοπικός (topikós, “pertaining to a place, local, pertaining to a common place, or topic, topical”), from τόπος (tópos, “a place”). 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 topic, spelled T-O-P-I-C, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.