think

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for think is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈθɪŋk/. Corpus data places it at rank #89 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 9 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 think, with forms such as "htink", "thhink", and "thikn". 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, "tin", "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 thinken, thynken, thenken, thenchen, from Old English þenċan, from Proto-West Germanic *þankijan, from Proto-Germanic *þankijaną (“to think”), from Proto-Indo-European *teng- (“to think, feel, know”). Cognate with Scots think, thynk (“to… 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 think, spelled T-H-I-N-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.