furlong

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for furlong is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈfɜːlɒŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #36,993 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 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 furlong, with forms such as "ffurlong", "frulong", and "fulrong". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "furlough", "fueling", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *dlongʰos From Middle English furlong, forlong (“unit of distance about one-eighth of a mile; quantity of land equal to one square furlong; racetrack for foot races; foot race”) [and other forms], from Old English furlang, furlung, from furh (“a f… 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 furlong, spelled F-U-R-L-O-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.