than

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for than is 4 letters long, classified as aconj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ðæn/. Corpus data places it at rank #77 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 2 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 than, with forms such as "htan", "tahn", and "thann". 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, "TN", "the", "tho", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English than, thanne, from Old English þanne, a variant of þonne (“then, since, because”), from Proto-West Germanic *þan, from Proto-Germanic *þan (“at that, at that time, then”), from earlier *þam, from Proto-Indo-European *tóm, accusative masc… 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 than, spelled T-H-A-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.