Archipelago

How to spell archipelago

11 letters · 5 syllables

122 of the 253 people asked to spell archipelago in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is archipeligo. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

archipeligo archipelago

What people typed instead

• archipeligo10 people
• archepelago9 people
• archipelego9 people
• archipellago6 people
• archipelligo6 people
• archapelago5 people

How to pronounce archipelago

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does archipelago mean?

1. nounA large group or chain of islands scattered across a sea or stretch of water.

Archipelago in a sentence

• The Indonesian archipelago is made up of thousands of separate islands.

• We booked a sailing holiday around a remote tropical archipelago.

Where does archipelago come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word reached English in the 1500s from the Italian arcipelago, which was the name Italian sailors gave to the Aegean Sea, the stretch of water densely scattered with Greek islands. It was built from the Greek arkhi-, meaning 'chief' or 'principal', joined to pelagos, meaning 'sea' or 'open water'. So the original sense was something like 'the chief sea', a fitting title for that famously island-studded body of water. Because the Aegean was so full of islands, English speakers gradually shifted the meaning away from the specific sea and onto the islands themselves, so that today an archipelago is any large group or chain of islands. The 'ch' is pronounced as a hard 'k' precisely because it traces back to the Greek arkhi-, the same element found in 'architect' and 'archive', and that hidden Greek origin is exactly why the spelling keeps the unexpected 'ch'.

How the word is built

• archi- (chief, principal)
• pelago (sea, from Greek pelagos)

People who misspell archipelago also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got archipelago wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• auspices 92% of them got it wrong
• butte 91% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 86% of them got it wrong
• connoisseur 84% of them got it wrong
• supersede 79% of them got it wrong
• battalion 79% of them got it wrong