curry favor
"curry-favor" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“curry favor” is outside the top-ranked English vocabulary, used as a verb - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - To seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | curry favor |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “curry favor” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for curry favor is 11 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 seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for curry favor, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
Etymologically, the entry records: Originally from a French poem Roman de Fauvel, written in the early 1300s; Fauvel was a conniving stallion, and the play was a satire on the corruption of social life. The name Fauvel points to the French fauve (“chestnut, reddish-yellow, or fawn”), another… The correct English form is curry favor, spelled C-U-R-R-Y- -F-A-V-O-R.
Definition
- 1To seek to gain favor by flattery or attention.
Etymology
Originally from a French poem Roman de Fauvel, written in the early 1300s; Fauvel was a conniving stallion, and the play was a satire on the corruption of social life. The name Fauvel points to the French fauve (“chestnut, reddish-yellow, or fawn”), another sense of fauve meaning the class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, and the medieval belief that a fallow horse was a symbol of deceit and dishonesty. The phrase curry Fauvel, then, referred to currying (“combing”) the horse, and was altered (as folk etymology) by later speakers to curry favor.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “curry favor”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is C-U-R-R-Y- -F-A-V-O-R - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.