passerby
"passerby" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“passerby” is uncommon English (frequency #50,141 among 46,516 “P” headwords), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #50,141
- frequency rank, English
- 46,516
- “P” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Alternative form of passer-by.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | passerby |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #50,141 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “passerby” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
passerby is uncommon English at frequency #50,141 among 46,516 “P” headwords, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Alternative form of passer-by.".
passerby doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is passerby, spelled P-A-S-S-E-R-B-Y.
Definition
- 1Alternative form of passer-by.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “passerby”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is P-A-S-S-E-R-B-Y - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Other uncommon English words near this rank
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.