pool

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for pool is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /puːl/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,171 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 Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 3 documented wrong-spelling variants for pool, with forms such as "opol", "pooll", and "ppool". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "pro", "pop", "pot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English pool, pole, pol, from Old English pōl (“pool”), from Proto-West Germanic pōl, from Proto-Germanic *pōlaz (“pool, pond”), from Proto-Indo-European *bōlos (“bog, marsh”). Cognate with Scots puil (“pool”), Saterland Frisian Pol (“pool”), We… 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 pool, spelled P-O-O-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.