forth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for forth is 5 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fɔːθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,625 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for forth, with forms such as "fforth", "forht", and "forrth". 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, "forum", "forty", "froth", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English forth, from Old English forþ, from Proto-West Germanic *forþ, from Proto-Germanic *furþą, from Proto-Indo-European *pŕ̥-to-, from *per-. Cognates include Dutch voort and German fort. See also ford. 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 forth, spelled F-O-R-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.