whiskey

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for whiskey is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwɪski/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,987 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 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for whiskey, with forms such as "hwiskey", "whhiskey", and "whiksey". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "whisky", "whitey", "whisper", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *wed- Proto-Indo-European *-r̥ Proto-Indo-European *wódr̥der. Proto-Celtic *udenskyos Old Irish uisce Irish uisce Proto-Indo-European *gʷeyh₃- Proto-Indo-European *-wós Proto-Indo-European *gʷih₃wós Proto-Celtic *biwos Pro… 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 whiskey, spelled W-H-I-S-K-E-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.