vilification
noun
vilification is spelled V-I-L-I-F-I-C-A-T-I-O-N. The wrong spelling people search most is villification: about 20 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 2 in 10 of all searches for the word. Vilification is a noun meaning “slanderous or malicious defamation; character assassination”. The plural of vilification is vilifications.
How do you spell vilification?
Vilification is spelled V-I-L-I-F-I-C-A-T-I-O-N. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 2 in 10 of the searches for vilification in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
What does vilification mean?
noun
- 1
slanderous or malicious defamation; character assassination
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce vilification?
Vilification has 5 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-vilification.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of vilification
- vilifications plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is vilification?
Vilification appears about once in every 5 million words in written English, the 69,884th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Vilification in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense 1. slanderous or malicious defamation:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| German | Schmähung, Verunglimpfung |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.