belong

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for belong is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /bɪˈlɒŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,740 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for belong, with forms such as "bbelong", "bellong", and "belnog". 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 also participates in 14 confusable-pair relationships, "blog", "bong", "below", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English belongen, bilongen, from Middle English be- + longen (“to be fitting, be suitable”), from Old English langian (“to pertain to, suit”), equivalent to be- + long (“to belong”). Compare Saterland Frisian beloangje (“to attain, reach, meet”)… 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 belong, spelled B-E-L-O-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.