still waters run deep

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for still waters run deep is 21 letters long, classified as a proverb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A person with a calm appearance has, or may have, considerable inner emotion, character, or intellect.".

No misspelling variants are generated for still waters run deep in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Of Latin origin, but possibly popularized by William Shakespeare, c. 1590, in "Henry VI," part 2, act 3, scene 1: : Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep; : And in his simple show he harbours treason. 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 still waters run deep, spelled S-T-I-L-L- -W-A-T-E-R-S- -R-U-N- -D-E-E-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.