boycott

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for boycott is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɔɪkɒt/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,444 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To abstain, either as an individual or a group, from using, buying, or dealing with someone or some organization as an expression of protest.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for boycott, with forms such as "bboycott", "bocyott", and "boyccott". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree English Charles Boycott English boycott From Charles Boycott, an English evicting land agent in Ireland who was subject to a boycott organized by the Irish Land League in 1880. For the surname see Boycott. 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 boycott, spelled B-O-Y-C-O-T-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.