die Kleinen hängt man, die Großen lässt man laufen

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The German entry for die Kleinen hängt man, die Großen lässt man laufen is 50 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [diː ˈklaɪ̯nən ˈhɛŋt man, diː ˈɡʁoːsn̩ lɛst man ˈlaʊ̯fn̩]. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "das Fällen von vergleichsweise leichten Urteilen (oder sogar Straffreiheit) für Beschuldigte mit Macht oder großem Einfluss auch bei schweren Vergehen/Verbrechen (beispielsweise bei Millionen-/Mill...".

No misspelling variants are generated for die Kleinen hängt man, die Großen lässt man laufen in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable German patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct German form is die Kleinen hängt man, die Großen lässt man laufen, spelled D-I-E- -K-L-E-I-N-E-N- -H-Ä-N-G-T- -M-A-N-,- -D-I-E- -G-R-O-S-S-E-N- -L-Ä-S-S-T- -M-A-N- -L-A-U-F-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.