pillow

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for pillow is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈpɪl.əʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,592 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for pillow, with forms such as "ipllow", "pilloww", and "pillwo". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 5 confusable-pair relationships, "plow", "pilot", "pills", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English pilwe, from Old English pyle, pylu (“pillow”), from Proto-West Germanic *pulwī (“pillow”), from Latin pulvīnus (“cushion”), derived from pulvis (“dust, powder”) + -īnus (“-ine”), for the filler of a pillow. Doublet of pulvinus. Cognate w… 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 pillow, spelled P-I-L-L-O-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.