cord

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cord is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kɔɹd/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,328 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for cord, with forms such as "ccord", "codr", and "cordd". 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, "CR", "cry", "cow", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English corde, from Old French corde, from Latin chorda, from Ancient Greek χορδή (khordḗ, “string of gut, the string of a lyre”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰerH- (“bowels, intestines”)). Doublet of chord and cuerda. More at yarn and hernia. 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 cord, spelled C-O-R-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.