chink

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for chink is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /t͡ʃɪŋk/. Corpus data places it at rank #46,376 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for chink, with forms such as "cchink", "chhink", and "chikn". 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, "chip", "coin", "Chun", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Of uncertain origin, but apparently an extension, with diminutive -k (see more at -ock), of Middle English chine (or, if already suffixed in Middle English, *chinek), from Old English ċine (“a crack, chine, chink”), equivalent to chine + -k. 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 chink, spelled C-H-I-N-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.