clothes

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for clothes is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kləʊ(ð)z/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,932 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for clothes, with forms such as "cclothes", "cllothes", and "clohtes". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "cloths", "cloves", "clutches", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English clothes, cloþes, plural of cloth, cloþ (“cloth, garment”), from Old English clāþas (“clothes”), plural of clāþ (“cloth”), equivalent to cloth + -es. Cognate with Scots clathes, claes (“clothes”), Danish klæder, Norwegian Bokmål klær, Nor… 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 clothes, spelled C-L-O-T-H-E-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.