stave off
"stave-off" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“stave off” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To prevent something from happening; to obviate or avert.
Corpus desk
Index EN-stave-off · stave off · English
stave off · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | stave off |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “stave off” in English
Rare enough to double-check
stave off is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To prevent something from happening; to obviate or avert.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for stave off, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. This entry stands alone in our confusable dataset, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is stave off, spelled S-T-A-V-E- -O-F-F.
Definition
- 1To prevent something from happening; to obviate or avert.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how stave off appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
He drank plenty of orange juice, hoping to stave off the cold making the rounds at the office.
[Enid] answer'd with such craft as women use, / Guilty or guiltless, to stave off a chance / That breaks upon them perilously, […]
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.