which

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for which is 5 letters long, classified as aconj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wɪt͡ʃ/. Corpus data places it at rank #59 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "And.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for which, with forms such as "hwich", "whcih", and "whhich". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "WIC", "with", "wish", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English which, hwic, wilche, hwilch, whilk, hwilc, from Old English hwelċ (“which”), from Proto-Germanic *hwilīkaz (“what kind”, literally “like what”), derived from *hwaz. By surface analysis, who + like. Cognates include Scots whilk (“which”),… 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 which, spelled W-H-I-C-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.