gold

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for gold is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡəʊld/. Corpus data places it at rank #692 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 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 gold, with forms such as "ggold", "glod", and "godl". 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, "got", "GOP", "goo", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English gold, from Old English gold (“gold”), from Proto-West Germanic *golþ, from Proto-Germanic *gulþą (“gold”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰl̥h₃tóm (“gold”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃- (“green, yellow”). Related to yellow; see there fo… 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 gold, spelled G-O-L-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.