bless

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for bless is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /blɛs/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,394 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for bless, with forms such as "bbless", "belss", and "bles". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "BLS", "boss", "blew", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English blessen, from Old English bletsian (“to consecrate (with blood)”), from Proto-West Germanic *blōdisōn (“to sprinkle, mark or hallow with blood”), from Proto-Germanic *blōþą (“blood”), of uncertain origin, possibly from Proto-Indo-Europea… 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 bless, spelled B-L-E-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.