'80s
"80s" is a 1-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“'80s” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 4
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Alternative spelling of 80s.
Corpus desk
Index EN-80s · '80s · English
'80s · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MID 4 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "'" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | '80s |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 4 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “'80s” in English
Rare enough to double-check
'80s is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Alternative spelling of 80s.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for '80s, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is '80s, spelled '-8-0-S.
Definition
- 1Alternative spelling of 80s.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how '80s appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The ’80s were fun, at least for me. With great pride, I can now claim to have been the first mainstream critic on the mailing list of SST Records, writing, of their initial Black Flag issue, "This record, a relentless wall of noise that is never less than noisy, sounds unlike anything else I've heard this year."
In the mid-to late ’80s, the UCLA lab obtained access to a long-term study of gay men who enrolled without knowing whether they were infected with HIV.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.