firstly

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for firstly is 7 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɜɹstli/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,694 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "In the first place; before anything else; first.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for firstly, with forms such as "ffirstly", "firrstly", and "firslty". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "firsts", "first", "firmly", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Coined before 1475, from Middle English fyrst-lyk, equivalent to first + -ly. 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 firstly, spelled F-I-R-S-T-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.