lady

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lady is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈleɪ.di/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,194 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 17 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for lady, with forms such as "aldy", "laddy", and "ladyy". 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, "law", "LED", "lay", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lady, laddy, lafdi, lavedi, from Old English hlǣfdīġe (“mistress of a household, wife of a lord, lady”, literally “bread-kneader”), from hlāf (“bread, loaf”) + dīġe (“kneader”), related to Old English dǣġe (“maker of dough”) (whence dey … 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 lady, spelled L-A-D-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.