backslash

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for backslash is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbækˌslæʃ/. Corpus data places it at rank #86,039 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for backslash 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: From back + slash, because it is a slash “leaning back” against the direction of writing (in writing lines from left to right), in contrast to the more common (forward) slash / (“solidus, oblique, diagonal”). The actual direction of (hand-)writing these mar… 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 backslash, spelled B-A-C-K-S-L-A-S-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.