husband

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for husband is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhʌz.bənd/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,080 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for husband, with forms such as "hhusband", "hsuband", and "hubsand". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "husbands", "husbandry", "Hubbard", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English husbonde, from Old English hūsbonda (“head of household”), from Old Norse húsbóndi, from hús + bóndi, corresponding to Proto-Germanic *hūsą (“house”) and *būandz (“dwelling, residing”, present participle). Compare English house and bond³. 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 husband, spelled H-U-S-B-A-N-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.