out-and-out
"out-and-out" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“out-and-out” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. 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) - Complete, utter.
Corpus desk
Index EN-out-and-out · out-and-out · English
out-and-out · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-5 5 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 | out-and-out |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “out-and-out” in English
Rare enough to double-check
out-and-out is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
out-and-out has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. 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.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is out-and-out, spelled O-U-T---A-N-D---O-U-T.
Definition
- 1Complete, utter.
- 2Thoroughly cross-bred; a breeding strategy esp. with poultry where new roosters are circulated yearly to maintain a mongrel flock.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how out-and-out appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
He is an out-and-out idiot.
an out-and-out lie
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.