thin

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for thin is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /θɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,200 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 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 thin, with forms such as "htin", "thhin", and "thinn". 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, "ti", "TN", "tip", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English thinne, thünne, thenne, from Old English þynne, from Proto-West Germanic *þunnī, from Proto-Germanic *þunnuz (“thin”) – compare *þanjaną (“to stretch, spread out”) – from Proto-Indo-European *ténh₂us (“thin”), from *ten- (“to stretch”). … 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 thin, spelled T-H-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.