sober

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sober is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsəʊ.bə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,850 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for sober, with forms such as "osber", "sboer", and "sobber". 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, "soe", "sor", "some", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English sober, from Old French sobre, from Latin sōbrius, from se- (“without”) + ebrius (“intoxicated”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁egʷʰ- (“drink”). In the sense "not drunk," displaced native undrunken, from Old English undruncen. 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 sober, spelled S-O-B-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.