lo

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for lo is 2 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ləʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,373 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "look, see, behold (in an imperative sense).".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for lo in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Lt", "LP", "Ls", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English lo, loo, from Old English lā (“exclamation of surprise, grief, or joy”). Conflated in Middle English with lo! (interjection), a corruption of lok!, loke! (“look!”) (as in lo we! (look we!)). Cognate with Scots lo, lu (“lo”). Se… 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 lo, spelled L-O, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.