Prevalence

How to spell prevalence

10 letters · 3 syllables

27 of the 53 people asked to spell prevalence in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

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

prevelance prevalence

What people typed instead

• prevelance11 people
• prevelence6 people
• prevalance5 people

How to pronounce prevalence

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does prevalence mean?

1. nounThe fact or condition of being widespread or common, often measured as how frequently something occurs in a population.

Prevalence in a sentence

• The survey measured the prevalence of remote working across the company.

• Researchers tracked the prevalence of diabetes in older adults.

Where does prevalence come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb valere, which meant 'to be strong' or 'to be powerful', the same root that gives us 'value', 'valid', and 'valiant'. By adding the prefix prae-, meaning 'before' or 'ahead', Latin formed praevalere, 'to be stronger' or 'to have the upper hand'. From that came the adjective praevalens, describing something that prevails or dominates, which English borrowed in the seventeenth century to form 'prevalence'. At first it carried the sense of greater power or superiority, but over time it shifted toward the modern meaning of being widespread or commonly found, especially in medicine and statistics. The spelling trap lives in the unstressed middle and the soft -ence ending: writers reach for the strong 'val' but then mishear the final syllable as -ance, even though the Latin -ens ancestry fixes it as -ence.

How the word is built

• prae- (before, ahead)
• val (to be strong, from valere)
• -ence (noun suffix)

People who misspell prevalence also struggle with

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

• idiosyncrasy 94% of them got it wrong
• supersede 92% of them got it wrong
• accessibility 91% of them got it wrong
• reconnaissance 85% of them got it wrong