poltergeist

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The Portuguese entry for poltergeist is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pow.teʁˈɡajs.t͡ʃi/ [poʊ̯.teɦˈɡaɪ̯s.t͡ʃi], /pow.teʁˈɡajst͡ʃ/ [poʊ̯.teɦˈɡaɪ̯st͡ʃ]. Corpus data places it at rank #48,600 in overall Portuguese word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "fenômeno tido como de origem paranormal onde um ou mais espíritos assombram um lugar provocando manifestações físicas ruidosas, com intuito de causar medo entre os vivos".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 17 documented wrong-spelling variants for poltergeist, with forms such as "opltergeist", "plotergeist", and "poletrgeist". 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.

No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct Portuguese form is poltergeist, spelled P-O-L-T-E-R-G-E-I-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.