Necessary or neccessary: which is correct?
Standard form: necessary — Non-standard: neccessary / necesary / neccesary. Necessary = needed to be done, achieved or present; essential.
- Part of speech
- adjective
- Source
- Merriam-Webster
Why
Merriam-Webster: necessary comes from Latin necessarius and has one c followed by a double s. The classroom mnemonic — a shirt has one collar and two sleeves — gives the letters in order.
Examples
- It is necessary to book in advance.
- Take only the necessary documents.
Wrong → right
Native spelling engine
- Checked against
- Merriam-Webster / Oxford
- Spelling authority
- Merriam-Webster · Oxford English Dictionary / Oxford spelling · SCOWL
- Commonly confused and non-standard forms
- 64
- Dictionary
- Hunspell en_US / en_GB / en_AU / en_CA · Dictionary license: MIT AND BSD (SCOWL combined licence)
Commonly confused words
Commonly confused words are pairs or groups that sound or look alike but differ in meaning or grammar, such as affect and effect, its and it’s, or principal and principle. Each entry here explains the difference in plain words, shows it in two example sentences and names the convention it follows: Merriam-Webster for American English, Oxford for British English. Spelling variants such as colour and color are marked as correct in their own variety, not as errors.
Related entries
- Standard form: separateNon-standard: seperate, seprate
- Standard form: occurrenceNon-standard: occurence, occurance, ocurrence
- Standard form: a lotNon-standard: alot
- Standard form: accommodateNon-standard: accomodate, acommodate, acomodate
- Standard form: definitelyNon-standard: definately, definitly, definetly
- Desert or dessert