gross

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for gross is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɡɹəʊs/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,305 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 11 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 gross, with forms such as "ggross", "gorss", and "gros". 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, "grow", "group", "guess", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English gros (“large, thick, full-bodied; coarse, unrefined, simple”), from Old French gros, from Latin grossus (“big, fat, thick”, in Late Latin also “coarse, rough”), of uncertain further origin but perhaps related to Proto-Celtic *brassos (“g… 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 gross, spelled G-R-O-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.