fortnight

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fortnight is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɔːt.naɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,920 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A period of 2 weeks.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 15 documented wrong-spelling variants for fortnight, with forms such as "ffortnight", "forntight", and "forrtnight". 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, "fortnightly", "fortnite", "foresight", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English fourtenyght, fourtene nyght, from Old English fēowertīene niht (literally “fourteen nights"; the Anglo-Saxons counted by nights), equivalent to fourteen + night. Compare sennight. 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 fortnight, spelled F-O-R-T-N-I-G-H-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.