black swan
/blæk ˈswɒn/
"black-swan" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“black swan” is outside the top-ranked English vocabulary, used as a noun - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Cygnus atratus, a swan with black plumage and a red bill which is endemic to Australia.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | black swan |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /blæk ˈswɒn/ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “black swan” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for black swan is 10 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /blæk ˈswɒn/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for black swan, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our dataset records no confusable match here, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English blak swan, calqued from a Latin quotation from Satire VI (written late 1st century – early 2nd century B.C.E.) of the Roman poet Juvenal: “Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno [a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan]!”. E… The correct English form is black swan, spelled B-L-A-C-K- -S-W-A-N.
Definition
- 1Cygnus atratus, a swan with black plumage and a red bill which is endemic to Australia.
- 2Something believed impossible or not to exist, especially if an example is subsequently found; also, something extremely rare; a rara avis.
- 3A rare and hard-to-predict event with major consequences.
Etymology
From Middle English blak swan, calqued from a Latin quotation from Satire VI (written late 1st century – early 2nd century B.C.E.) of the Roman poet Juvenal: “Rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno [a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan]!”. Equivalent to black + swan. Sense 2.1 (“something believed impossible or not to exist”) is from the fact that all swans were thought to have white plumage until black swans were discovered in Australia in the 17th century by Dutch explorers. Sense 2.2 (“rare and hard-to-predict event”) was popularized by the Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960) in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007): see the quotation.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “black swan”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is B-L-A-C-K- -S-W-A-N - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /blæk ˈswɒn/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.