high-strung
"high-strung" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“high-strung” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Nervous; anxious; excited or excitable.
Corpus desk
Index EN-high-strung · high-strung · English
high-strung · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "H" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | high-strung |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “high-strung” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
high-strung is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Nervous; anxious; excited or excitable.".
No misspelling variants are generated for high-strung in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
No documented word history exists for this headword, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is high-strung, spelled H-I-G-H---S-T-R-U-N-G.
Definition
- 1Nervous; anxious; excited or excitable.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how high-strung appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Three cups of coffee made him a fidgety and high-strung lecturer.
"Why, you're shakin' all over!" "I suppose I wouldn't be a medium if I wasn't high strung."
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
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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.