scratches

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for scratches is 9 letters long, classified as anoun. Corpus data places it at rank #16,121 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "plural of scratch".

Our generated misspelling index lists 15 likely wrong-spelling variants for scratches, with forms such as "csratches", "scartches", and "sccratches". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 5 confusable-pair relationships, "scratchy", "swatches", "stretches", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From scratch + -es. 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 scratches, spelled S-C-R-A-T-C-H-E-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.