least

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for least is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /liːst/. Corpus data places it at rank #348 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for least, with forms such as "elast", "laest", and "leasst". 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, "let", "les", "LST", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: The adjective, determiner, and noun are derived from Middle English leste, lest, last (“(adjective) smallest, least; (noun) smallest thing, etc.; person or thing least in importance; etc.”), from Old English lǣst, a contraction of læsast, læsest (“least”) (… 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 least, spelled L-E-A-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.