dry as a bone
"dry-as-a-bone" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“dry as a bone” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - completely dry; totally dry
Corpus desk
Index EN-dry-as-a-bone · dry as a bone · English
dry as a bone · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "D" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | dry as a bone |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “dry as a bone” in English
Rare enough to double-check
dry as a bone is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "completely dry; totally dry".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for dry as a bone, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. Our dataset records no confusable match here, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is dry as a bone, spelled D-R-Y- -A-S- -A- -B-O-N-E.
Definition
- 1completely dry; totally dry
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how dry as a bone appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Wrong! When we got there, it was not only cloudy and cold, but dry as a bone!
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.