job's a good 'un

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for job's a good 'un is 16 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌdʒɒbz ə ˈɡʊd(ə)n/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Expresses satisfaction that a task has been or will be carried out successfully, often suggesting that the task is simple, or ironically implying that it has been completed in a cursory or slapdash...".

No misspelling variants are generated for job's a good 'un in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Attested in 1968, but probably popularised by footballer Robbie Fowler who, after scoring four goals in a Premier League match against Middlesbrough on 14 December 1996, revealed a T-shirt with the phrase written on it in marker pen. He explained to the pre… 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 job's a good 'un, spelled J-O-B-'-S- -A- -G-O-O-D- -'-U-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.