old country
"old-country" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“old country” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The country of origin of an immigrant or of a person of immigrant descent.
Corpus desk
Index EN-old-country · old country · English
old country · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "O" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | old country |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “old country” in English
Rare enough to double-check
old country is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "The country of origin of an immigrant or of a person of immigrant descent.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for old country, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is easiest explained by how it's pronounced rather than where it came from. The correct English form is old country, spelled O-L-D- -C-O-U-N-T-R-Y.
Definition
- 1The country of origin of an immigrant or of a person of immigrant descent.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how old country appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
"Look at all the children!" Saxon cried. "School's letting out. And nearly all are Portuguese, Billy, NOT Porchugeeze. Mercedes taught me the right way." "They never wore glad rags like them in the old country," Billy sneered. "They had to come over here to get decent clothes and decent grub."
This word in other languages
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.