paper-tiger

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for paper tiger is 11 letters long, classified as anoun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Something or someone that appears powerful, strong or threatening but is in reality weak, ineffective, or unable to withstand challenge.".

No misspelling variants are generated for paper tiger in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.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: A calque from Chinese 紙老虎／纸老虎 (zhǐlǎohǔ), a phrase popularized by Mao Zedong, but of pre-modern origin. An English translation first appeared in an book in 1828 by British missionary and lexicographer Robert Morrison. 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 paper tiger, spelled P-A-P-E-R- -T-I-G-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.