locust

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for locust is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈləʊ.kəst/. Corpus data places it at rank #28,979 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for locust, with forms such as "lcoust", "llocust", and "loccust". 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, "lost", "lust", "lotus", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *lek-der.? Latin locusta Anglo-Norman locustebor. Middle English locuste English locust Inherited from Middle English locuste, locust, from Anglo-Norman locuste, Middle French locuste, and their source, Latin locustam (“lo… 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 locust, spelled L-O-C-U-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.