out of the mouths of babes

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for out of the mouths of babes is 26 letters long, classified as a proverb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "From the comments of children, who are honest and innocent, . . . (comes truth or wisdom).".

No misspelling variants are generated for out of the mouths of babes in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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.

Etymologically, the entry records: From King James Bible, Psalms 8:2, "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength". (Note that mouth is singular in the Biblical verse, and that the usage of this expression differs from the modern proverbial usage.) 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 out of the mouths of babes, spelled O-U-T- -O-F- -T-H-E- -M-O-U-T-H-S- -O-F- -B-A-B-E-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.