daft

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for daft is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɑːft/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,207 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 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 daft, with forms such as "adft", "dafft", and "daftt". 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, "DT", "day", "dan", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English dafte, defte (“gentle; having good manners; humble, modest; awkward; dull; boorish”), from Old English dæfte (“accommodating; gentle, meek, mild”), from Proto-West Germanic *daftī (“fitting, suitable”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-Europea… 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 daft, spelled D-A-F-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.