outstanding

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for outstanding is 11 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌaʊtˈstæn.dɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,014 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "present participle and gerund of outstand".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 17 documented wrong-spelling variants for outstanding, with forms such as "otustanding", "ousttanding", and "outsatnding". 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 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 outstand, equivalent to out- + standing or outstand + -ing. 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 outstanding, spelled O-U-T-S-T-A-N-D-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.