house of cards
/ˈhaʊs.ʌvˌkɑɹdz/
"house-of-cards" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“house of cards” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A structure made by stacking playing cards in a pyramidal fashion.
Corpus desk
Index EN-house-of-cards · house of cards · English
house of cards · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 14 letters
- VOW-5 5 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 | house of cards |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈhaʊs.ʌvˌkɑɹdz/ |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “house of cards” in English
Rare enough to double-check
house of cards is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /ˈhaʊs.ʌvˌkɑɹdz/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
No misspelling variants are generated for house of cards in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. This headword has no recorded confusable partner, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is house of cards, spelled H-O-U-S-E- -O-F- -C-A-R-D-S.
Definition
- 1A structure made by stacking playing cards in a pyramidal fashion.
- 2Any structure with alternating vertical and horizontal layers.
- 3A structure or argument built on a shaky foundation.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how house of cards appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The essentials of megalithic construction are either the single large slab or the large slab as walling stone with another large slab resting on two or more large walling stones as a capstone—a sort of house of cards architecture.
Dolmens impress only by their massiveness: their house-of-cards construction is the simplest possible […]
This word in other languages
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.