looking

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for looking is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈlʊkɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #242 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for looking, with forms such as "llooking", "loking", and "lokoing". 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 18 confusable-pair relationships, "losing", "loving", "loring", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English lokynge, from earlier lokinde, lokende, from Old English lōciende, present participle of Old English lōcian (“to look”), equivalent to look + -ing. 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 looking, spelled L-O-O-K-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.