Spelling.School · How to spell

How to spell informal

What it means: Casual or relaxed in style.

In a sentence: We had an informal picnic in the park yesterday. ▶

The part people get wrong

Often misspelled as unformal or informel.

Same family: formal, formality, informally, formation, reform. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: Informal comes from the Latin root "formare," meaning "to shape," plus the negative prefix "in-", so it literally means "not according to the usual shape or form." Over time, it shifted from describing something not strictly structured to describing relaxed, casual situations and language.

Patterns it uses: Prefixes keep every letter

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