bough

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for bough is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /baʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #40,156 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for bough, with forms such as "bbough", "boguh", and "bouggh". 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, "bug", "bush", "bout", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *bʰeh₂ǵʰús From Middle English bough (“branch of a bush or tree, especially a main branch; limb of an animal or person; something resembling a branch (such as a plant root or branch of a nerve); (figuratively) Christian cross; descendant, offsprin… 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 bough, spelled B-O-U-G-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.