hearth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hearth is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /hɑːθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #25,404 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for hearth, with forms such as "eharth", "haerth", and "hearht". 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, "heat", "heath", "heats", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English herth, herthe, from Old English heorþ, from Proto-West Germanic *herþ, from Proto-Germanic *herþaz, possibly from Proto-Indo-European *kerh₃- (“heat; fire”). Cognate with West Frisian hurd, Dutch haard, German Herd, Swedish härd. 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 hearth, spelled H-E-A-R-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.