body

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for body is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɒd.i/. Corpus data places it at rank #382 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 21 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for body, with forms such as "bbody", "bdoy", and "boddy". 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, "by", "buy", "boy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰewdʰ- Proto-West Germanic *bodag Old English bodiġ Middle English bodi English body From Middle English body, bodi, bodiȝ, from Old English bodiġ, bodeġ (“body, trunk, chest, torso, height, stature”), from Proto-West Ge… 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 body, spelled B-O-D-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.