scold

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for scold is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /skəʊld/. Corpus data places it at rank #36,752 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A person who habitually scolds, in particular a troublesome and angry woman.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for scold, with forms such as "csold", "sccold", and "sclod". 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, "sol", "sod", "sold", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: The noun is from Middle English scold(e), skald(e), first attested in the 12th or 13th century (as scold, scolde, skolde, skald). The verb is from Middle English scolden, first attested in the late 1300s. Most dictionaries derive the verb from the noun and … 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 scold, spelled S-C-O-L-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.