post-haste

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for post-haste is 10 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌpəʊstˈheɪst/. 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: "Alternative spelling of posthaste.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for post-haste in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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: From the former instruction on letters "haste, post, haste," later reinterpreted as a compound of post + haste. 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 post-haste, spelled P-O-S-T---H-A-S-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.