its

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for its is 3 letters long, classified as adet, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪts/. Corpus data places it at rank #75 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Belonging to it.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for its in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "IV", "iz", "ivy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Equivalent to it + -s (possessive marker). From the earlier form it's (it + -'s), which is now considered nonstandard. Began to displace his as the possessive of the neuter pronoun in the Middle English period; had fully displaced it by the 1700s. 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 its, spelled I-T-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.