HBO
/ˌeɪtʃ ˌbiː ˈoʊ/
"hbo" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“HBO” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #10,553 in English word frequency and used as a proper noun.
- #10,553
- frequency rank, English
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Initialism of Home Box Office, a premium movie and entertainment channel.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | HBO |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| IPA | /ˌeɪtʃ ˌbiː ˈoʊ/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #10,553 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “HBO” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for HBO is 3 letters long, classified as a proper noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌeɪtʃ ˌbiː ˈoʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,553 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Initialism of Home Box Office, a premium movie and entertainment channel.".
HBO doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "he", "hi", "HD", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is HBO, spelled H-B-O.
Definition
- 1Initialism of Home Box Office, a premium movie and entertainment channel.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “HBO”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is H-B-O - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ˌeɪtʃ ˌbiː ˈoʊ/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “he” - see the side-by-side comparison. HBO vs he
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.