sound

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sound is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /saʊnd/. Corpus data places it at rank #742 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.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 sound, with forms such as "osund", "sonud", and "soudn". 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, "sun", "sud", "soup", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English sound, sund, isund, ȝesund, from Old English sund (“sound, safe, whole, uninjured, healthy, prosperous”), from Proto-West Germanic *sund, from Proto-Germanic *sundaz (“healthy”), merged with synonymous Old English ġesund, from Proto-West… 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 sound, spelled S-O-U-N-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.