out of the way
"out-of-the-way" is a 11-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“out of the way” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adverb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Unusually or excessively.
Corpus desk
Index EN-out-of-the-way · out of the way · English
out of the way · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 14 letters
- VOW-6 6 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 of the way |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adverb |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “out of the way” in English
Rare enough to double-check
out of the way is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadverb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Unusually or excessively.".
out of the way doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our dataset records no confusable match here, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, 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 out of the way, spelled O-U-T- -O-F- -T-H-E- -W-A-Y.
Definition
- 1Unusually or excessively.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how out of the way appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
'I'm not an out of the way nervous woman.'
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.