viz.

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for viz. is 4 letters long, classified as an adverb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /vɪz/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Videlicet: namely, to wit, that is to say, specifically, as an illustration.".

No misspelling variants are generated for viz. in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Medieval Latin viꝫ, from Latin vidēlicet (“that is to say, namely”), short for vidēre licet (“it is permitted to see, look (it is) legal”). The ‘z’ was originally not a letter but a common Middle Latin scribal abbreviation ꝫ that was used for -et, spec… 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 viz., spelled V-I-Z-., and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.