hint

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hint is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /hɪnt/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,363 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 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 hint, with forms such as "hhint", "hinnt", and "hintt". 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, "hn", "his", "hit", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hinten, hynten, variant of henten (“to lay hold of, catch”), from Old English hentan (“to seize, grasp”), from Proto-West Germanic *hantijan, from Proto-Germanic *hantijaną. Doublet of hent. Related also to hunt. 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 hint, spelled H-I-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.