obese

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for obese is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /oʊˈbis/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,573 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Extremely overweight, especially: weighing more than 20% (for men) or 25% (for women) over their conventionally ideal weight determined by height and build; or, having a body mass index over 30 kg/m².".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for obese, with forms such as "boese", "obbese", and "obees". 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 11 confusable-pair relationships, "obs", "ones", "obey", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Latin obēsus, derived from obedō (“I devour, eat away”), from ob (“away”) + edō (“I eat”). Displaced native Old English oferfǣtt (literally “overfat”). 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 obese, spelled O-B-E-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.