look

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for look is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /lʊk/. Corpus data places it at rank #151 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for look, with forms such as "llook", "lok", and "loko". 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, "lot", "low", "los", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English loken, lokien, from Old English lōcian, from Proto-West Germanic *lōkōn. Further origin unknown, no certain cognates outside Germanic. Cognate with Scots luke, luik, leuk (“to look, see”), West Frisian lôkje, loaitsje (“to look”), Dutch … 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 look, spelled L-O-O-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.