kept

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for kept is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkɛpt/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,086 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "simple past and past participle of keep".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for kept, with forms such as "ekpt", "keppt", and "keptt". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "KT", "KP", "key", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English kept, kepte, from Old English cēpte; see -t. 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 kept, spelled K-E-P-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.