fowl
/faʊl/
"fowl" is a 4-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“fowl” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #28,924 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #28,924
- frequency rank, English
- 4
- letters
- 5
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A bird hunted or kept for food, grouped into landfowl (order Galliformes), also called gamefowl, and waterfowl (order Anseriformes: ducks, geese, swans, etc.), which together form the clade Galloan...
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | fowl |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /faʊl/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #28,924 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “fowl” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for fowl is 4 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /faʊl/. Corpus data places it at rank #28,924 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 5 likely wrong-spelling variants for fowl, with forms such as "ffowl", "fowll", and "fowwl". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "FW", "fox", "FTW", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English foul, foghel, fowel, fowele, from Old English fugol (“bird”), from Proto-West Germanic *fugl, from Proto-Germanic *fuglaz, dissimilated variant of *fluglaz (compare Old English flugol ‘fleeing’, Mercian fluglas heofun ‘birds of the air’)… The correct English form is fowl, spelled F-O-W-L.
Definition
- 1A bird hunted or kept for food, grouped into landfowl (order Galliformes), also called gamefowl, and waterfowl (order Anseriformes: ducks, geese, swans, etc.), which together form the clade Galloanserae.
- 2Any bird.
Etymology
From Middle English foul, foghel, fowel, fowele, from Old English fugol (“bird”), from Proto-West Germanic *fugl, from Proto-Germanic *fuglaz, dissimilated variant of *fluglaz (compare Old English flugol ‘fleeing’, Mercian fluglas heofun ‘birds of the air’), from *fleuganą (“to fly”). Cognate with West Frisian fûgel, Low German Vagel, Dutch vogel, German Vogel, Swedish fågel, Danish and Norwegian fugl. Doublet of voël. More at fly.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ffowl,fowll,fowwl,fwol,ofwl
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of fowl - measured in single-character edits (insert, delete, or substitute a letter). Larger bars are easier to catch; one-edit slips are the sneakiest.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “fowl”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is F-O-W-L - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /faʊl/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “FW” - see the side-by-side comparison. fowl vs FW
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.