a little bird told me

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for a little bird told me is 21 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ə ˌlɪtl̩ bɜːd ˈtəʊld miː/. 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: "I received the information from a source which I am not prepared to disclose.".

No misspelling variants are generated for a little bird told me in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English 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.

Etymologically, the entry records: The etymology is unknown; in English sources, references to birds passing along information to people date back to at least the 16th century (see the 1546 quotation), and in other languages even earlier. For example, Ecclesiastes 10:20 in the Bible, the ori… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is a little bird told me, spelled A- -L-I-T-T-L-E- -B-I-R-D- -T-O-L-D- -M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.