thick

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for thick is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /θɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,265 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for thick, with forms such as "htick", "thcik", and "thhick". 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, "tic", "tik", "this", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English thikke, from Old English þicce (“thick, dense”), from Proto-West Germanic *þikkwī, from Proto-Germanic *þekuz (“thick”), from Proto-Indo-European *tégus (“thick”). Cognates Cognate with North Frisian sjok, tjok, tjuk, tschok (“thick”), S… 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 thick, spelled T-H-I-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.