add insult to injury
"add-insult-to-injury" is a 17-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“add insult to injury” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 20
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To further a loss with mockery or indignity; to worsen an already unfavorable situation.
Corpus desk
Index EN-add-insult-to-injury · add insult to injury · English
add insult to injury · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 20 letters
- VOW-7 7 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "A" 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 | add insult to injury |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 20 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “add insult to injury” in English
Rare enough to double-check
add insult to injury is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To further a loss with mockery or indignity; to worsen an already unfavorable situation.".
Zero misspellings are on record for add insult to injury in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
Etymologically, the entry records: Derived from the fables of Phaedrus in the first century CE. The story was of a bald man who swats at a fly which has just landed on his head, but instead hits himself on the head. The fly comments, "You wished to kill me for a touch. What will you do to yo… The correct English form is add insult to injury, spelled A-D-D- -I-N-S-U-L-T- -T-O- -I-N-J-U-R-Y.
Definition
- 1To further a loss with mockery or indignity; to worsen an already unfavorable situation.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how add insult to injury appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
As if the hostile takeover weren't enough, to add insult to injury they scrapped ninety percent of our products and replaced them with their own.
[...] the line crossed over an iron bridge spanning Ludgate Hill itself [...] neatly obliterating any view of St Paul's from Ludgate Circus and Fleet Street. A thousand people had put their names to a petition against the bridge. To add insult to injury it carried a small thicket of railway signals as well as regular steam trains.
Etymology
Derived from the fables of Phaedrus in the first century CE. The story was of a bald man who swats at a fly which has just landed on his head, but instead hits himself on the head. The fly comments, "You wished to kill me for a touch. What will you do to yourself since you have added insult to injury?" (quid facies tibi, Iniuriae qui addideris contumeliam?) The actual wording appears in English from the middle of the 18th century.
Synonyms
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.