foot the bill
"foot-the-bill" is a 11-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“foot the bill” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To pay for something.
Corpus desk
Index EN-foot-the-bill · foot the bill · English
foot the bill · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 13 letters
- VOW-4 4 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 | foot the bill |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “foot the bill” in English
Rare enough to double-check
foot the bill is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To pay for something.".
No misspelling variants are generated for foot the bill in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. We don't track a confusable pairing for this entry, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is foot the bill, spelled F-O-O-T- -T-H-E- -B-I-L-L.
Definition
- 1To pay for something.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how foot the bill appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The cop tried the door. “It's locked, hey,” he said. “Bust it down,” roared Oedipa, “and Hitler Hilarius here will foot the bill.”
When I spoke to Hitachi, it was very open that it will foot the bill, not taxpayers or farepayers.
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.