full to the gills
"full-to-the-gills" is a 14-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“full to the gills” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 17
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Completely or overly full.
Corpus desk
Index EN-full-to-the-gills · full to the gills · English
full to the gills · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 17 letters
- VOW-4 4 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 | full to the gills |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 17 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “full to the gills” in English
Rare enough to double-check
full to the gills is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Completely or overly full.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for full to the gills, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. Our dataset records no confusable match here, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is full to the gills, spelled F-U-L-L- -T-O- -T-H-E- -G-I-L-L-S.
Definition
- 1Completely or overly full.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how full to the gills appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Even though the room was full to the gills with people, they managed to push enough people aside to open up a small dance floor.
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.