notwithstanding

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for notwithstanding is 15 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌnɒtwɪðˈstændɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,457 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Nevertheless, all the same.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 25 documented wrong-spelling variants for notwithstanding, with forms such as "nnotwithstanding", "notiwthstanding", and "nottwithstanding". 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 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: From Middle English notwithstandinge, notwithstondyng, natwithstandyng, equivalent to not + withstanding. Compare Middle English notgainstonding, not aȝenstondynge, of similar meaning and formation. 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 notwithstanding, spelled N-O-T-W-I-T-H-S-T-A-N-D-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.