homophobe

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for homophobe is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhəʊ.məˌfəʊb/. Corpus data places it at rank #49,398 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "One who is prejudiced against homosexual people, or LGBTQ people in general; one who exhibits homophobia.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for homophobe, with forms such as "hhomophobe", "hmoophobe", and "hommophobe". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "homophobic", "homophobia", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Back-formation from homophobia, equivalent to homo- + -phobe (notice in Greek it would refer to a self-hater). 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 homophobe, spelled H-O-M-O-P-H-O-B-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.