not worth the candle

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for not worth the candle is 20 letters long, classified as an adjective. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Not worth the cost or trouble.".

No misspelling variants are generated for not worth the candle in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Calque of French le jeu n'en vaut pas la chandelle. 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 not worth the candle, spelled N-O-T- -W-O-R-T-H- -T-H-E- -C-A-N-D-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.