fraught

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for fraught is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fɹɔːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #24,758 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for fraught, with forms such as "farught", "ffraught", and "fraguht". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "fright", "freight", "fought", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English fraught, fraght, freght (“transport of goods or people (usually by water); charge for such transport; facilities for such transport; cargo or passengers of a ship; ballast of a ship; goods in general; (figurative) burden; charge”), from … 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 fraught, spelled F-R-A-U-G-H-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.