feed a cold, starve a fever

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for feed a cold, starve a fever is 27 letters long, classified as a proverb. 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: "Expressing the common belief that eating more will cure the common cold, and eating less will cure a fever.".

No misspelling variants are generated for feed a cold, starve a fever in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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: An old wives' tale that dates back to 1574 from the original "Fasting is a great remedie of fever." 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 feed a cold, starve a fever, spelled F-E-E-D- -A- -C-O-L-D-,- -S-T-A-R-V-E- -A- -F-E-V-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.