fox in the henhouse

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fox in the henhouse is 19 letters long, classified as a noun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Someone untrustworthy placed in a position of trust in which they will be harmful, damaging or detrimental for their own personal gain.".

No misspelling variants are generated for fox in the henhouse in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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: A metaphor referring to the fox as a predator that would prey on the chickens if given an opportunity to do so. 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 fox in the henhouse, spelled F-O-X- -I-N- -T-H-E- -H-E-N-H-O-U-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.