foul wind
"foul-wind" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“foul wind” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A wind blowing against the direction of travel.
Corpus desk
Index EN-foul-wind · foul wind · English
foul wind · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "F" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | foul wind |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “foul wind” in English
Rare enough to double-check
foul wind is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A wind blowing against the direction of travel.".
foul wind doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. This headword has no recorded confusable partner, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is foul wind, spelled F-O-U-L- -W-I-N-D.
Definition
- 1A wind blowing against the direction of travel.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how foul wind appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
We lost several hours having to tack into a foul wind just off the coast.
Antonyms
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.