thanks

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for thanks is 6 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈθæŋks/. Corpus data places it at rank #362 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Used to express appreciation or gratitude.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for thanks, with forms such as "htanks", "tahnks", and "thakns". 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, "think", "thats", "trans", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English thanks, thankes, from Old English þancas (“thanks”), from Proto-Germanic *þankōs, nominative plural of *þankaz (“thought, gratitude”), from Proto-Indo-European *teng- (“to think, feel”). More at thank. 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 thanks, spelled T-H-A-N-K-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.