little

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for little is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlɪ.tl̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #173 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 12 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 little, with forms such as "ilttle", "litle", and "litlte". 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 10 confusable-pair relationships, "lotte", "Lottie", "littlest", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English litel, from Old English lyttel, lȳtel, from Proto-West Germanic *lūtil, from Proto-Germanic *lūtilaz (“tending to stoop, crouched, little”), from Proto-Indo-European *lewd- (“to bend, bent, small”), equivalent to lout + -le. Cognate with… 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 little, spelled L-I-T-T-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.