eye-for-an-eye

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for eye for an eye is 14 letters long, classified as anoun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Compensation for injury caused by a person, in the form of inflicting an identical injury on that person.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for eye for an eye in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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.

Etymologically, the entry records: Calque of Hebrew עין תחת עין (ayin tahat ayin), in reference to Exodus 21:23-25: "And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for st… 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 eye for an eye, spelled E-Y-E- -F-O-R- -A-N- -E-Y-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.