triangle

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for triangle is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtɹaɪəŋɡəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,993 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for triangle, with forms such as "rtiangle", "tirangle", and "traingle". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "tangle", "triage", "tingle", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *tréyes From Middle English triangle, from Old French triangle, from Latin triangulum, noun use of adjective triangulus (“three-cornered, having three angles”), from trēs (“three”) + angulus (“corner, angle”), equivalent to tri- + -angle. 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 triangle, spelled T-R-I-A-N-G-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.