last-but-not-least

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for last but not least is 18 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlæst bʌt nɑt ˈlist/. 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: "An expression to start the last item of a list, emphasising that while it is listed last, it is just as important as the rest of the items.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for last but not least in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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: Rhetoric: A possible/common pattern to arrange a speech or essay suggests putting your strongest and thus most important argument favoring your own opinion first and conclude with the weakest, thus least important argument. 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 but not least, spelled L-A-S-T- -B-U-T- -N-O-T- -L-E-A-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.