fly in the face of
"fly-in-the-face-of" is a 14-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“fly in the face of” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 18
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To act in a manner highly contrary to; to counteract or contradict.
Corpus desk
Index EN-fly-in-the-face-of · fly in the face of · English
fly in the face of · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 18 letters
- VOW-6 6 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "F" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | fly in the face of |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 18 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “fly in the face of” in English
Rare enough to double-check
fly in the face of is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To act in a manner highly contrary to; to counteract or contradict.".
Zero misspellings are on record for fly in the face of in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is fly in the face of, spelled F-L-Y- -I-N- -T-H-E- -F-A-C-E- -O-F.
Definition
- 1To act in a manner highly contrary to; to counteract or contradict.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how fly in the face of appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The new design is very edgy and certainly flies in the face of tradition.
DB Cargo is clearly upset by the Royal Mail decision. Not only will it lose a valuable customer, but this flies in the face of its own high-profile campaign, called Freight Belongs on Rail.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.