pain in the bum
"pain-in-the-bum" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“pain in the bum” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 15
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Someone or something very annoying.
Corpus desk
Index EN-pain-in-the-bum · pain in the bum · English
pain in the bum · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 15 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "P" 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 | pain in the bum |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 15 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “pain in the bum” in English
Rare enough to double-check
pain in the bum is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Someone or something very annoying.".
No misspelling variants are generated for pain in the bum in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. We don't track a confusable pairing for this entry, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is pain in the bum, spelled P-A-I-N- -I-N- -T-H-E- -B-U-M.
Definition
- 1Someone or something very annoying.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how pain in the bum appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
2000, Max Allen, Crush: The New Australian Wine Book This is fine and dandy for the wineries and the consumer […] but it’s a pain in the bum for people like me who have to pigeonhole everybody to make them fit nicely in a book.
2003, Alan Grayson, Mile End “Yes, she’s a pain in the bum, coming over all the time.”
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.