mirth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mirth is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /mɜɹθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #46,070 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for mirth, with forms such as "imrth", "mirht", and "mirrth". 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, "mit", "MRT", "myth", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English merth, myrthe, murhthe, from Old English myrġþ (“mirth, joy”), from Proto-West Germanic *murgiþu (“briefness, brevity”); equivalent to merry + -th (abstract nominal suffix). Cognate with Middle Dutch merchte (“pleasure, joy, delight”). 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 mirth, spelled M-I-R-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.