put down to
"put-down-to" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“put down to” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To ascribe; to assume to be the cause of a situation.
Corpus desk
Index EN-put-down-to · put down to · English
put down to · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "P" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | put down to |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “put down to” in English
Rare enough to double-check
put down to is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To ascribe; to assume to be the cause of a situation.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for put down to, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is put down to, spelled P-U-T- -D-O-W-N- -T-O.
Definition
- 1To ascribe; to assume to be the cause of a situation.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how put down to appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I put the high crime rate down to the high unemployment.
Collins' death can be put down to his devil-may-care attitude—his decision to journey through hostile territory in a large convoy, the inadequate choice of the members of the convoy, and the tactics he adopted in the ambush. For all the debate about ballistics and entry and exit wounds, and the use of powerful historical imaginations, it matters more that…
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.