Unparalleled

How to spell unparalleled

12 letters · 4 syllables

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

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

unparalled unparalleled

What people typed instead

• unparalled5 people
• unparallelled4 people
• unparralleled4 people
• unparalelled3 people
• unparallel3 people

How to pronounce unparalleled

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does unparalleled mean?

1. adjectiveSo exceptional that it has no equal or comparison.

Unparalleled in a sentence

• The new factory offers unparalleled levels of safety for its workers.

• Critics agreed that her command of the language was unparalleled.

Where does unparalleled come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built on parallel, which came into English in the 1500s from the French parallèle, itself drawn from the Latin parallelus and ultimately from the Greek parallēlos, meaning 'alongside one another' or 'side by side'. The Greek term joined para, meaning 'beside', with allēlōn, meaning 'of one another', so it literally described two things running next to each other. From the geometric idea of lines that never meet grew the figurative sense of things that are evenly matched or comparable. Adding the negative prefix un- and the adjective ending -ed produced 'having no parallel', that is, without equal or match. The notorious spelling trap lives in the middle: parallel carries a single r but a doubled l (par-al-lel), and the final -ed is barely heard, so writers routinely lose track of how many l letters belong where.

How the word is built

• un- (not)
• parallel (from Greek parallēlos: side by side)
• -ed (adjective suffix)

People who misspell unparalleled also struggle with

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

• idiosyncrasy 100% of them got it wrong
• connoisseur 96% of them got it wrong
• paparazzi 56% of them got it wrong