small fortune

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for small fortune is 13 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /smɔːl ˈfɔːtʃuːn/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A large amount of money, especially one paid for something.".

No misspelling variants are generated for small fortune in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From small + fortune (“one’s wealth; the amount of money one has, especially if it is vast; large amount of money”), suggesting a sizeable sum of money but not all of one’s wealth. 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 fortune, spelled S-M-A-L-L- -F-O-R-T-U-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.