paltry

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for paltry is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɒltɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #34,625 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for paltry, with forms such as "apltry", "palltry", and "palrty". 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 12 confusable-pair relationships, "party", "Patty", "parry", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle Low German paltrig (“ragged, rubbishy, worthless”), from palter, palte (“cloth, rag, shred”), from Old Saxon *paltro, *palto (“cloth, rag”), from Proto-Germanic *paltrô, *paltô (“scrap, rag, patch”). Of uncertain ultimate origin, but perhaps fro… 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 paltry, spelled P-A-L-T-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.