measly

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for measly is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmiːzli/. Corpus data places it at rank #37,570 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 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 measly, with forms such as "emasly", "maesly", and "mealsy". 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 8 confusable-pair relationships, "messy", "meaty", "merely", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From measle (“singular of measles”) + -y; the word measle is either from Middle Dutch masel (“a blister filled with blood; a pustule, a skin blemish”), or Middle Low German masel (“a red skin blemish”), from Proto-Germanic *masuraz (“a knot or scar in wood;… 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 measly, spelled M-E-A-S-L-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.