zealous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for zealous is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈzɛləs/. Corpus data places it at rank #29,529 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Full of zeal; ardent, fervent; exhibiting enthusiasm or strong passion, particularly in matters of religion.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for zealous, with forms such as "ezalous", "zaelous", and "zeallous". 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 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 Middle English zelose, from Latin zēlōsus, from zēlus + -ōsus, from Ancient Greek ζῆλος (zêlos, “zeal, jealousy”), from ζηλόω (zēlóō, “to emulate, to be jealous”). By surface analysis, zeal + -ous. Doublet of jealous. 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 zealous, spelled Z-E-A-L-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.