foreign

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for foreign is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɒɹɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #875 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for foreign, with forms such as "fforeign", "foerign", and "foregin". 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, "foreman", "foreigner", "feign", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English foreyn, forein, from Old French forain, from Vulgar Latin *forānus (“outsider, outlander”), from Latin forās (“outside, outdoors”) or forīs (“outside, outdoors”). Displaced native Old English elþēodiġ (“foreign”) and now-dialectal Englis… 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 foreign, spelled F-O-R-E-I-G-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.