altogether

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for altogether is 10 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɔːl.tʊˈɡɛð.ə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,324 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for altogether, with forms such as "alltogether", "alotgether", and "altgoether". 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 altogeder, altogedere, equivalent to al- (“all”) + together. Cognate with Scots awthegither (“altogether”), Middle High German alzegater (“altogether”), Dutch altegaar. Compare also Old English ealġeador, eallġeador (“altogether”), West … 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 altogether, spelled A-L-T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.