feet of clay

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for feet of clay is 12 letters long, classified as a noun. 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: "In someone apparently strong and without failings, a hidden weakness which could lead to downfall.".

No misspelling variants are generated for feet of clay 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: Used in the Bible, part of the description of the huge statue in the dream of Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar. 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 feet of clay, spelled F-E-E-T- -O-F- -C-L-A-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.