goodbye

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for goodbye is 7 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡʊdˈbaɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,305 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Farewell; a formula used to another person or persons when the speaker, writer, or person addressed is departing.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for goodbye, with forms such as "ggoodbye", "godbye", and "godobye". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "goody", "goode", "goodie", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From earlier goodby, Godby, Godby'e, Godbwye, God b'w'y, God bwy yee, God buy you, God be wi' you, each a progressively shorter contraction of God be with ye or God be with you. Note the change of God to good by confusion with good morning, good night, etc.… 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 goodbye, spelled G-O-O-D-B-Y-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.