sorrow

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sorrow is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɒɹ.əʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,772 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 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 sorrow, with forms such as "osrrow", "sororw", and "sorow". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "sorry", "sparrow", "sorrows", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sorwe, sorow, sorewe, from Old English sorg, sorh (“care, anxiety, sorrow, grief”), from Proto-West Germanic *sorgu, from Proto-Germanic *surgō (compare West Frisian soarch, Dutch zorg, German Sorge, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian sorg), … 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 sorrow, spelled S-O-R-R-O-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.