all-that-glitters-is-not-gold

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for all that glitters is not gold is 29 letters long, classified as aproverb. 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: "Things that appear valuable or worthwhile might not actually be so; things that appear nice might not be as good as they appear.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for all that glitters is not gold in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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: Calque of Latin nōn omne quod nitet aurum est (“not all that shines is gold”). Popularized by William Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, see quotations. 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 all that glitters is not gold, spelled A-L-L- -T-H-A-T- -G-L-I-T-T-E-R-S- -I-S- -N-O-T- -G-O-L-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.