nothing

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for nothing is 7 letters long, classified as apron, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈnʌθ.ɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #256 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for nothing, with forms such as "nnothing", "nohting", and "nothhing". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "noting", "noticing", "netting", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English nothyng, noon thing, non thing, na þing, nan thing, nan þing, from Old English nāþing, nān þing (“nothing”, literally “not any thing”), equivalent to no + thing. Compare Old English nāwiht (“nothing”, literally “no thing”), Swedish ingen… 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 nothing, spelled N-O-T-H-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.