dark night of the soul

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for dark night of the soul is 22 letters long, classified as a noun. 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: "a period of time in which a holy person (someone believed to be potentially on their way to sainthood) experiences a seeming withdrawal of God's previously-felt presence in their lives, and undergo...".

No misspelling variants are generated for dark night of the soul in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Coined by John of the Cross. 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 dark night of the soul, spelled D-A-R-K- -N-I-G-H-T- -O-F- -T-H-E- -S-O-U-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.