glad

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for glad is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡlæd/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,342 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for glad, with forms such as "gald", "gglad", and "gladd". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "god", "GTA", "GPA", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English glad, gled, from Old English glæd (“shining; bright; cheerful; glad”), from Proto-Germanic *gladaz (“shiny; gleaming; radiant; happy; glossy; smooth; flat”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰladʰ-, from *ǵʰelh₂- (“to shine”). Cognate with Sco… 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 glad, spelled G-L-A-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.