out of work
"out-of-work" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“out of work” 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
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - unemployed, or having nothing to do
Corpus desk
Index EN-out-of-work · out of work · English
out of work · 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 | out of work |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Prep_phrase |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “out of work” in English
Rare enough to double-check
out of work is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as aprep_phrase. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
out of work has no tracked misspelling variants, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
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 of work, spelled O-U-T- -O-F- -W-O-R-K.
Definition
- 1unemployed, or having nothing to do
- 2not working correctly; out of order
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how out of work appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
This lost time was caused mainly because the operator had to find the dispatcher and notify him that the machine was out of work.
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.