foremost

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for foremost is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɔː.məʊst/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,900 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for foremost, with forms such as "fforemost", "foermost", and "foremmost". 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, "forest", "Fremont", "Formosa", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Old English formest, fyrmest (“earliest, first, most prominent”), from Proto-Germanic *frumistaz, from the locative stem *fur-, *fr- + the superlative suffix *-umistaz, stem ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *pr-. The suffix *-umistaz was a compound … 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 foremost, spelled F-O-R-E-M-O-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.