three strikes and you're out

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for three strikes and you're out is 28 letters long, classified as a phrase. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Three mistakes, rule breaches etc. will result in termination, disqualification or similar.".

No misspelling variants are generated for three strikes and you're out in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Figurative extension of the literal origin in baseball, where either three strikes or four balls retire the batter. 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 three strikes and you're out, spelled T-H-R-E-E- -S-T-R-I-K-E-S- -A-N-D- -Y-O-U-'-R-E- -O-U-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.