forthwith

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for forthwith is 9 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fɔːθˈwɪð/. Corpus data places it at rank #44,210 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Without delay; immediately.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for forthwith, with forms such as "fforthwith", "forhtwith", and "forrthwith". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English forth-with (“at once, immediately; at the same time, already; straight ahead”) [and other forms], partly from the phrase forth with (something), and partly from forth-with-al, furth-with-al (“at once, immediately; together with”) (whence… 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 forthwith, spelled F-O-R-T-H-W-I-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.