pout

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for pout is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /paʊt/. Corpus data places it at rank #35,889 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for pout, with forms such as "oput", "potu", and "poutt". 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, "pt", "PU", "put", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English pouten, probably from Scandinavian (compare Norwegian pute (“pillow, cushion”), dial. Swedish puta (“to be puffed out”), Danish pude (“pillow, cushion”)), from Proto-Germanic *pūto (“swollen”) (compare English eelpout, Dutch puit, Low Ge… 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 pout, spelled P-O-U-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.