slight

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for slight is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /slaɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,982 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for slight, with forms such as "lsight", "silght", and "slgiht". 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 11 confusable-pair relationships, "slit", "Sligo", "sought", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English slight (“bad, of poor quality, unimportant, trivial, slender, slim, smooth, level”), from Old English sliht (“smooth, level”), from Proto-Germanic *slihtaz (“slippery, flat, level, plain”), related to English slick. Cognate with Scots sl… 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 slight, spelled S-L-I-G-H-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.