GMO
"gmo" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“GMO” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #20,935 in English word frequency and used as an adjective.
- #20,935
- frequency rank, English
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Genetically modified.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | GMO |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #20,935 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “GMO” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for GMO is 3 letters long, classified as an adjective. Corpus data places it at rank #20,935 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Genetically modified.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for GMO, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "go", "GP", "GS", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is GMO, spelled G-M-O.
Definition
- 1Genetically modified.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “GMO”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is G-M-O - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Don't mix it up with “go” - see the side-by-side comparison. GMO vs go
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.