already

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for already is 7 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɔːlˈɹɛdi/. Corpus data places it at rank #253 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for already, with forms such as "alerady", "allready", and "alraedy". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.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: From Middle English alredy (“fully; already”), equivalent to al- (“all, completely”) + ready. Cognate with West Frisian alreeds (“already”), Dutch alreeds (“already”), Afrikaans alreeds (“already”), Middle Low German alreide, alreids ("already"; whence mode… 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 already, spelled A-L-R-E-A-D-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.