dull

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for dull is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dʌl/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,788 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 4 documented wrong-spelling variants for dull, with forms such as "ddull", "dlul", and "dul". 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, "duo", "dun", "dum", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English dull, dul (also dyll, dill, dwal), from Old English dol (“dull, foolish, erring, heretical; foolish, silly; presumptuous”), from Proto-West Germanic *dol, from Proto-Germanic *dulaz, from earlier *dwulaz, a variant of *dwalaz (“stunned, … 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 dull, spelled D-U-L-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.