blimey

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for blimey is 6 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈblaɪmi/. Corpus data places it at rank #48,626 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Used to express anger, excitement, surprise, etc.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for blimey, with forms such as "bblimey", "bilmey", and "bliemy". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "blimp", "blame", "blige", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: A minced oath derived from (God) blind me (either concurrent with or from a clipping of cor blimey or gorblimey), or blame me. Compare crivvens, drat, etc. 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 blimey, spelled B-L-I-M-E-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.