outlaw

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for outlaw is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈaʊt.lɔː/. Corpus data places it at rank #14,801 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for outlaw, with forms such as "otulaw", "oultaw", and "outalw". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 5 confusable-pair relationships, "outta", "outlet", "outlay", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English outlawe, outlagh, utlaȝe, from Old English ūtlaga (“outlaw”), borrowed from Old Norse útlagi (“outlaw, fugitive”), equivalent to out- + law. Cognate with Icelandic útlagi (“outlaw”). 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 outlaw, spelled O-U-T-L-A-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.