Illegal

How to spell illegal

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce illegal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does illegal mean?

1. adjectiveForbidden by law or against the rules.

Illegal in a sentence

• Parking on the double yellow lines is illegal in this city.

• The auditors found that the transfer of funds was entirely illegal.

Where does illegal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin lex, with the stem leg-, which meant 'law' and is the same root that gives us 'legal', 'legislate' and 'legitimate'. The negative was formed by adding the prefix in-, meaning 'not', which assimilated to il- before a word beginning with 'l', producing the Late Latin illegalis, 'not according to law'. English took the word in during the seventeenth century, partly through French illegal, and it kept the doubled letter that the assimilation created. The doubling of the 'l' is the main spelling trap: one 'l' belongs to the prefix il- and the other begins the root leg-, so the word carries two distinct 'l' sounds for two distinct reasons. Remembering that 'legal' sits whole inside 'illegal', with only an 'il' bolted on the front, makes the spelling easy to reconstruct.

How the word is built

• il- (assimilated form of in-: not)
• leg (from Latin lex, legis: law)
• -al (adjective suffix)