both

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for both is 4 letters long, classified as adet, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /bəʊθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #157 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Each of the two; one and the other; referring to two individuals or items.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for both, with forms such as "bboth", "boht", and "bothh". 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, "Bt", "but", "boy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English bothe, boþe, from Old English bā þā (“both the; both those”) and possibly reinforced by Old Norse báðir, from Proto-Germanic *bai. Cognate with Saterland Frisian bee (“both”), West Frisian beide (“both”), Dutch beide (“both”), German bei… 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 both, spelled B-O-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.