practical joke
"practical-joke" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“practical joke” is outside the top-ranked English vocabulary, used as a noun - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A playful trick done for amusement to the detriment of someone else.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | practical joke |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “practical joke” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for practical joke is 14 letters long, classified as a noun. 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: "A playful trick done for amusement to the detriment of someone else.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for practical joke, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, 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 practical joke, spelled P-R-A-C-T-I-C-A-L- -J-O-K-E.
Definition
- 1A playful trick done for amusement to the detriment of someone else.
This word in other languages
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 “practical joke”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is P-R-A-C-T-I-C-A-L- -J-O-K-E - 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.