dole

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for dole is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dəʊl/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,808 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To distribute in small amounts; to share out small portions of a meager resource.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for dole, with forms such as "ddole", "dloe", and "doel". 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, "due", "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 dol, from Old English dāl (“portion, share, division, allotment”), from Proto-Germanic *dailą (“part, deal”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰayl- (“part, watershed”). Cognate with Old Church Slavonic дѣлити (děliti, “divide”). More at deal. 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 dole, spelled D-O-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.