mouth breather
"mouth-breather" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“mouth breather” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A person who routinely inhales and exhales through the mouth, instead of through the nose.
Corpus desk
Index EN-mouth-breather · mouth breather · English
mouth breather · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 14 letters
- VOW-5 5 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 | mouth breather |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “mouth breather” in English
Rare enough to double-check
mouth breather is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
No generated misspelling entries exist for mouth breather in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is mouth breather, spelled M-O-U-T-H- -B-R-E-A-T-H-E-R.
Definition
- 1A person who routinely inhales and exhales through the mouth, instead of through the nose.
- 2A person who is boorish, stupid, or otherwise unattractive.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how mouth breather appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Respirations cannot be recorded by this method, if the subject is a mouth breather (as no air flows by the thermistor in the nose).
She's a philosophy major from Brown, now working retail at Niagara Falls, living in a trailer and working for a "mouth breather" of a boss.
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.