put to shame
"put-to-shame" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“put to shame” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 12
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To humiliate; to disgrace.
Corpus desk
Index EN-put-to-shame · put to shame · English
put to shame · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 12 letters
- VOW-4 4 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 to shame |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “put to shame” in English
Rare enough to double-check
put to shame is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
put to shame doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. We don't track a confusable pairing for this entry, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct English form is put to shame, spelled P-U-T- -T-O- -S-H-A-M-E.
Definition
- 1To humiliate; to disgrace.
- 2To outdo thoroughly; to surpass; to outperform; to show up.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how put to shame appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Any other man in my place would have gone to his house and shot him down like a dog. I wanted to do it, and was minded to do it, but a better thought came to me: to put him to shame; to break his heart; to kill him by inches.
[Europe] has ever carried her own standard of perfection, by which we can measure her falls and gauge her degrees of failure, by which we can call her before her own tribunal and put her to shame,—the shame which is the sign of the true pride of nobleness.
Synonyms
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.