goblin

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for goblin is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɡɒb.lɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #19,353 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for goblin, with forms such as "gbolin", "ggoblin", and "gobblin". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "goin", "Golan", "Godwin", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English gobelyn, from Old Northern French gobelin (compare Norman goubelin, Walloon gobelin), possibly a blend of Old Dutch *kobeholdo (“goblin”) (compare Dutch kabouter, German Kobold) and Late Latin cobalus (“mountain sprite”), from Ancient Gr… 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 goblin, spelled G-O-B-L-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.