bolster

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for bolster is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɒlstə/. Corpus data places it at rank #19,274 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for bolster, with forms such as "bbolster", "bloster", and "bollster". 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 10 confusable-pair relationships, "buster", "bolted", "bowser", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English bolster, bolstre, from Old English bolster (“pillow”), from Proto-West Germanic *bolstr, from Proto-Germanic *bulstraz (“pillow, cushion”). Cognate with Scots bowster (“bolster”), West Frisian bulster (“mattress”), Dutch bolster (“husk, … 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 bolster, spelled B-O-L-S-T-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.