unable

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for unable is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʌnˈeɪbl̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,469 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Not able; lacking a certain ability.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for unable, with forms such as "nuable", "uanble", and "unabble". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "uncle", "usable", "unstable", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English unable, unabel, unhable, unhabil, equivalent to un- + able. 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 unable, spelled U-N-A-B-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.