lamb

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lamb is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /læm/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,930 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 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for lamb, with forms such as "almb", "labm", and "lambb". 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, "lb", "LM", "law", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lamb, from Old English lamb, from Proto-West Germanic *lamb, from Proto-Germanic *lambaz, probably from Proto-Indo-European *h₁l̥h₁onbʰos, enlargement of *h₁elh₁én, ultimately from *h₁el-. See also Dutch lam, German Lamm, Bavarian Lamper… 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 lamb, spelled L-A-M-B, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.