smite hip and thigh

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for smite hip and thigh is 19 letters long, classified as a verb. 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: "To defeat overwhelmingly.".

No misspelling variants are generated for smite hip and thigh 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: Derived from a phrase in the book of Judges, verse 15:8, taking the first half of the sentence as synonymous with the rest. 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 smite hip and thigh, spelled S-M-I-T-E- -H-I-P- -A-N-D- -T-H-I-G-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.