stay the course
"stay-the-course" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“stay the course” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 15
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To persist or continue, especially in the face of difficulties.
Corpus desk
Index EN-stay-the-course · stay the course · English
stay the course · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 15 letters
- VOW-6 6 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 | stay the course |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 15 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “stay the course” in English
Rare enough to double-check
stay the course is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To persist or continue, especially in the face of difficulties.".
No generated misspelling entries exist for stay the course in our index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is stay the course, spelled S-T-A-Y- -T-H-E- -C-O-U-R-S-E.
Definition
- 1To persist or continue, especially in the face of difficulties.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how stay the course appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
If you decide to stay the course and finish engineering school, it will mean long hours and sleepless nights.
This sort of thing is meat and drink to the born Controller—and Controllers are born with the right imperturbable temperament for the job; hence the fact that they are recruited from many different grades of operating staff, and some recruits don't stay the course.
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.