hostess

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hostess is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhoʊstɪs/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,338 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 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 hostess, with forms such as "hhostess", "hosetss", and "hosstess". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "hosts", "hottest", "hotness", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hostesse, from Middle French hostesse, from Old French ostesce, made up of oste (“host”) + -esce (“feminine marker”). 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 hostess, spelled H-O-S-T-E-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.