food

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for food is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fuːd/. Corpus data places it at rank #386 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for food, with forms such as "ffood", "fod", and "fodo". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "for", "fox", "fro", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English fode, foode, from Old English fōda (“food”), from Proto-West Germanic *fōdō, from Proto-Germanic *fōdô (“food”), from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂- (“to guard, graze, feed”). Cognate with Scots fuid (“food”), Low German föde, vöde (“food”),… 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 food, spelled F-O-O-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.