last

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for last is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lɑːst/. Corpus data places it at rank #141 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for last, with forms such as "alst", "lasst", and "lastt". 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, "Lt", "Ls", "lot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English laste, latst, syncopated variant of latest. 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 last, spelled L-A-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.