disheartening
"disheartening" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“disheartening” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #34,465 in English word frequency and used as an adjective.
- #34,465
- frequency rank, English
- 13
- letters
- 20
- tracked misspellings
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Causing a person to lose heart; making despondent or gloomy.
Compare similar words
See how disheartening compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | disheartening |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 13 |
| Frequency rank | #34,465 |
| Misspellings tracked | 20 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “disheartening” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for disheartening is 13 letters long, classified as an adjective. Corpus data places it at rank #34,465 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Causing a person to lose heart; making despondent or gloomy.".
Our generated misspelling index lists 20 likely wrong-spelling variants for disheartening, with forms such as "ddisheartening", "dihseartening", and "disehartening". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. 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.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is disheartening, spelled D-I-S-H-E-A-R-T-E-N-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Causing a person to lose heart; making despondent or gloomy.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ddisheartening,dihseartening,disehartening,dishaertening,dishearetning,dishearrtening,dishearteinng,disheartenign,dishearteningg,dishearteninng,disheartennig,disheartenning,disheartneing,dishearttening,disheatrening,disheratening,dishheartening,dissheartening,dsiheartening,idsheartening
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of disheartening - measured in single-character edits (insert, delete, or substitute a letter). Larger bars are easier to catch; one-edit slips are the sneakiest.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “disheartening, English word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/en/word/disheartening
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “disheartening”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is D-I-S-H-E-A-R-T-E-N-I-N-G - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our English index: