plain text
"plain-text" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“plain text” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Text or any data that is to be encrypted (as opposed to ciphertext).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | plain text |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “plain text” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
plain text is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
No misspelling variants are generated for plain text in our index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is plain text, spelled P-L-A-I-N- -T-E-X-T.
Definition
- 1Text or any data that is to be encrypted (as opposed to ciphertext).
- 2Human readable text which consists only of a string of characters, represented using a character encoding such as ASCII or Unicode. In the file format sense, plain text may represent structured data in a human readable format such as XML.
- 3Data which consists only of human-readable unformatted text, as opposed to machine-readable binary data or formatted/structured text. In this sense, the character data in between XML tags may be called "plain text".
Synonyms
Antonyms
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “plain text”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is P-L-A-I-N- -T-E-X-T - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
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.