gone

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for gone is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡɒn/. Corpus data places it at rank #693 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "past participle of go".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for gone, with forms such as "ggone", "gnoe", and "goen". 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", "gun", "GOP", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English gon, igon, gan, ȝegan, from Old English gān, ġegān, from Proto-Germanic *gānaz (“gone”), past participle of *gāną (“to go”). Cognate with West Germanic Scots gane (“gone”), West Frisian gien (“gone”), Low German gahn (“gone”), and Dutch … 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 gone, spelled G-O-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.