small

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for small is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /smɔl/. Corpus data places it at rank #291 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for small, with forms such as "msall", "samll", and "smal". 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, "still", "smart", "smile", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English smal, from Old English smæl (“small, narrow, slender”), from Proto-Germanic *smalaz (“small”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)mal-, *(s)mel- (“small, mean, malicious”). Cognate with Scots smal; sma (“small”); West Frisian smel (“narrow”); … 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 small, spelled S-M-A-L-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.