off course
"off-course" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“off course” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a prep_phrase. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Not following the planned, or intended, route.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | off course |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Prep_phrase |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “off course” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
off course is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as aprep_phrase. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Not following the planned, or intended, route.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for off course, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. We don't track a confusable pairing for this entry, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is off course, spelled O-F-F- -C-O-U-R-S-E.
Definition
- 1Not following the planned, or intended, route.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “off course”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is O-F-F- -C-O-U-R-S-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.