the shits
"the-shits" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“the shits” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. 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) - Diarrhoea.
Corpus desk
Index EN-the-shits · the shits · English
the shits · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "T" 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 | the shits |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “the shits” in English
Rare enough to double-check
the shits is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Diarrhoea.".
Zero misspellings are on record for the shits in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. We don't track a confusable pairing for this entry, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
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 the shits, spelled T-H-E- -S-H-I-T-S.
Definition
- 1Diarrhoea.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how the shits appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
"I feel bad we're havin' this nice bonding moment while we both got the shits." "Could be worse. We could be trying to use the toilet simultaneously."
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.