scout
/skaʊt/
"scout" is a 5-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“scout” is a regularly-used English word, ranked #7,498 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #7,498
- frequency rank, English
- 5
- letters
- 7
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A person sent out to gather and bring back information; especially, one employed in war to gain information about the enemy and ground.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | scout |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /skaʊt/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #7,498 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “scout” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for scout is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /skaʊt/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,498 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. Wiktionary records 11 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for scout, with forms such as "csout", "sccout", and "scotu". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "sou", "sot", "shot", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English scout, scoult, from Old French escoute (“action of listening”), verbal noun from escouter (“to listen, heed”), from Latin auscultō (“to listen”). The verb comes from the noun. The correct English form is scout, spelled S-C-O-U-T.
Definition
- 1A person sent out to gather and bring back information; especially, one employed in war to gain information about the enemy and ground.
- 2An act of scouting or reconnoitering.
- 3A member of any number of youth organizations belonging to the international scout movement, such as the Boy Scouts of America or Girl Scouts of the United States.
- 4A person who assesses or recruits others; especially, one who identifies promising talent on behalf of a sports team.
- 5A person employed to monitor rivals' activities in the petroleum industry.
- 6A housekeeper or domestic cleaner, generally female, employed by one of the constituent colleges of Oxford University to clean rooms; generally equivalent to a modern bedder at Cambridge University.
- 7A domestic servant, generally male, who would attend (usually several) students in a variety of ways, including cleaning; generally equivalent to a gyp at Cambridge University or a skip at Trinity College, Dublin.
- 8A fielder in a game for practice.
- 9A fighter aircraft.
- 10A preliminary image that allows the technician to make adjustments before the actual diagnostic images.
- 11A term of address for a man or boy.
Etymology
From Middle English scout, scoult, from Old French escoute (“action of listening”), verbal noun from escouter (“to listen, heed”), from Latin auscultō (“to listen”). The verb comes from the noun.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: csout,sccout,scotu,scoutt,scuot,socut,sscout
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of scout - counted as single-character edits (an insertion, a deletion, or a substituted letter). The larger the bar, the easier the typo is to spot; one-edit slips are the ones that sneak past readers.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “scout”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is S-C-O-U-T - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /skaʊt/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “sou” - see the side-by-side comparison. scout vs sou
- 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.