dock

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for dock is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɒk/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,218 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 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 dock, with forms such as "dcok", "ddock", and "docck". 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, "dog", "don", "dot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English dokke, from Old English docce, from Proto-West Germanic *dokkā, from Proto-Germanic *dukkǭ (compare Old Danish dokke (“water-dock”), West Flemish dokke, dokkebladeren (“coltsfoot, butterbur”)), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰew- (“dark”) (c… 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 dock, spelled D-O-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.