How to spell extraordinary

hear itex·traor·di·nar·y/ɪk'strɔr,dənɛri/adjectiveAcademic

What it means: Unusually remarkable or exceptional.

In a sentence: The magician put on an extraordinary show with his dazzling tricks.

The part people get wrong

Watch for an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear. Often misspelled as extraodinary or exordinary.

Same family: extraordinarily, extraordinariness, remarkable, unusual, ordinary. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: “Extraordinary” comes from the Latin phrase ‘extra ordinem,’ meaning ‘outside the usual order.’ Over time it came to describe people or things that stand out because they are much better, stranger, or rarer than normal.

Patterns it uses: The unstressed vowel (schwa)

Try spelling it

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