unlike

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for unlike is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʌnˈlaɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,652 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 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for unlike, with forms such as "nulike", "ulnike", and "unilke". 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, "unwise", "unlikely", "unite", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English unlic, unlich, from Old English unlīċ, unġelīċ (“unlike, different, dissimilar, diverse”), from Proto-Germanic *ungalīkaz. By surface analysis, un- + like. Cognate with Dutch ongelijk, German ungleich, Old Norse úlíkr (see there for Nort… 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 unlike, spelled U-N-L-I-K-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.