make good
"make-good" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“make good” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To achieve substantial success in life, often in business.
Corpus desk
Index EN-make-good · make good · English
make good · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "M" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | make good |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “make good” in English
Rare enough to double-check
make good is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 5 senses are on record.
make good has no tracked misspelling variants, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is make good, spelled M-A-K-E- -G-O-O-D.
Definition
- 1To achieve substantial success in life, often in business.
- 2To complete successfully; to fulfil (a promise).
- 3To match the first player's bet with one's own, rather than dropping out.
- 4To remedy or compensate for (a defect or deficiency).
- 5To make (a surface) level or even.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how make good appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Near-synonym: come good
America does vaguely feel a man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man doing good.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.