sorry

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sorry is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɒɹ.i/. Corpus data places it at rank #682 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 4 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 sorry, with forms such as "osrry", "sorryy", and "sory". 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, "soy", "sry", "sort", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sory, from Old English sāriġ (“feeling or expressing grief, sorry, grieved, sorrowful, sad, mournful, bitter”), from Proto-West Germanic *sairag, from Proto-Germanic *sairagaz (“sad”), from Proto-Indo-European *seh₂yro (“hard, rough, pai… 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 sorry, spelled S-O-R-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.