thorough

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for thorough is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈθʌɹə/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,512 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for thorough, with forms such as "htorough", "thhorough", and "thoorugh". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "though", "trough", "through", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English thoruȝ, þoruȝ, from Old English þuruh, a byform of Old English þurh, whence comes English through. The adjective derives from the preposition and adverb. The word developed a syllabic form in cases where the word was fully stressed: when… 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 thorough, spelled T-H-O-R-O-U-G-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.