Respelled

Respelled is the past participle of the verb respell, meaning spelled again or in a different way. As an adjective, it describes a word whose spelling has been altered from its original form, or more broadly any variant created through an orthographic revision or transliteration.

In linguistics and philology, respelled forms arise from spelling reforms, transliteration from non-Latin scripts, or editorial amendments in texts. The term signals that the change is a deliberate rewriting of the spelling rather than a new lexical item. Respelled forms are often discussed in the context of historical documents, manuscript transmission, or language-standardization efforts, where researchers track how a word’s spelling has shifted over time or across languages.

In bibliographic and archival contexts, notes may label a form as respelled to distinguish it from the original or standardized spelling. This helps readers trace the transmission and reception of a term across languages, regions, or editions, and can clarify why multiple spellings appear in sources.

Examples of respelling occur in name transcription and transliteration. For instance, a proper name originally written with diacritics in one language might be respelled in another language’s orthography, yielding a form that appears different in English texts. Similarly, Cyrillic names may be respelled as Latin-script variants such as Ivan or Iwan, depending on transliteration conventions.

See also: respell, spelling variant, transliteration, orthography.