hound
/haʊnd/
"hound" is a 5-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“hound” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #16,494 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #16,494
- frequency rank, English
- 5
- letters
- 7
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A dog, particularly a breed with a good sense of smell developed for hunting other animals.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hound |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /haʊnd/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #16,494 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “hound” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for hound is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /haʊnd/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,494 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for hound, with forms such as "hhound", "honud", and "houdn". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "hun", "HUD", "hour", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hound, from Old English hund, from Proto-West Germanic *hund, from Proto-Germanic *hundaz, from pre-Germanic *ḱuntós (compare Latvian sùnt-ene (“big dog”), enlargement of Proto-Indo-European *ḱwṓ (“dog”). Doublet of canine. In 14th-centu… The correct English form is hound, spelled H-O-U-N-D.
Definition
- 1A dog, particularly a breed with a good sense of smell developed for hunting other animals.
- 2Any canine animal.
- 3Someone who seeks something.
- 4A male who constantly seeks the company of desirable women.
- 5A despicable person.
- 6A houndfish.
Etymology
From Middle English hound, from Old English hund, from Proto-West Germanic *hund, from Proto-Germanic *hundaz, from pre-Germanic *ḱuntós (compare Latvian sùnt-ene (“big dog”), enlargement of Proto-Indo-European *ḱwṓ (“dog”). Doublet of canine. In 14th-century England, hound was the general word for all domestic canines, and dog referred to a subtype resembling the modern mastiff and bulldog. By the 16th century, dog had become the general word, and hound had begun to refer only to breeds used for hunting.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hhound,honud,houdn,houndd,hounnd,huond,ohund
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of hound - measured in single-character edits (insert, delete, or substitute a letter). Larger bars are easier to catch; one-edit slips are the sneakiest.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “hound”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is H-O-U-N-D - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /haʊnd/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “hun” - see the side-by-side comparison. hound vs hun
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
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.