obey

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for obey is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əʊˈbeɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,219 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for obey, with forms such as "boey", "obbey", and "obeyy". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "oy", "OE", "one", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English obeyen, from Anglo-Norman obeir, obeier et al., Old French obeir, from Latin oboediō (also obēdiō (“to listen to, harken, usually in extended sense, obey, be subject to, serve”)), from ob- (“before, near”) + audiō (“to hear”). Compare au… 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 obey, spelled O-B-E-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.