cast the first stone

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cast the first stone is 20 letters long, classified as a verb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To act self-righteously in accusing another person, believing oneself to be blameless.".

No misspelling variants are generated for cast the first stone in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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: From the Bible John 8:7, where Jesus tells the accusers of a woman of adultery that "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her". All accusers did not do so, and Jesus forgave the woman's sin. 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 cast the first stone, spelled C-A-S-T- -T-H-E- -F-I-R-S-T- -S-T-O-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.