black swan
/blæk ˈswɒn/
"black-swan" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“black swan” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Cygnus atratus, a swan with black plumage and a red bill which is endemic to Australia.
Corpus desk
Index EN-black-swan · black swan · English
black swan · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "B" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| 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) |
Long-tail rank of “black swan” in English
Rare enough to double-check
black swan is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /blæk ˈswɒn/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
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.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how black swan appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Mankind were wrong, it seems, in concluding that all swans were white: are we also wrong, when we conclude that all men's heads grow above their shoulders, and never below, in spite of the conflicting testimony of the naturalist Pliny? As there were black swans, though civilised people had existed for three thousand years on the earth without meeting with…
If you tell me that there is or that there is not a black swan or a white raven, I want to know where you mean; and that you can only show me,—no description will answer the purpose.
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.