loathsome

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for loathsome is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈləʊð.səm/. Corpus data places it at rank #41,230 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Highly offensive; abominable, sickening.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for loathsome, with forms such as "laothsome", "lloathsome", and "loahtsome". 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 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: From Middle English lothsum, from Old English *lāþsum, from Proto-West Germanic *laiþasam, equivalent to loath + -some. Cognate with Middle Low German lêtsam (“arduous”), German leidsam (“sad, sorry”). 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 loathsome, spelled L-O-A-T-H-S-O-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.