thumbing
"thumbing" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“thumbing” is uncommon English (frequency #64,769 among 3,151 “T” headwords), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #64,769
- frequency rank, English
- 3,151
- “T” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The act by which something is thumbed.
Corpus desk
Index EN-thumbing · thumbing · English
thumbing · rank #64,769 · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-RARE #64,769
- LEN-LONG 8 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 3,151
- PHOTO-FINISH Thorburn
Nearest frequency peer: Thorburn (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Long-tail ranks near “thumbing”
Sparse band: bars invert rank so rarer forms read shorter
- Thera
Thera
35,235 corpus weight
- Thetford
Thetford
35,234 corpus weight
- Thorburn
Thorburn
35,233 corpus weight
- thumbing
thumbing
35,232 corpus weight
- tilak
tilak
35,231 corpus weight
- timekeeping
timekeeping
35,230 corpus weight
What this shows Long-tail view: where “thumbing” sits against similarly uncommon English ranks.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | thumbing |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #64,769 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “thumbing” in English
Rare enough to double-check
thumbing is uncommon English at frequency #64,769 among 3,151 “T” headwords, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "The act by which something is thumbed.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for thumbing, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
No documented word history exists for this headword, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is thumbing, spelled T-H-U-M-B-I-N-G.
Definition
- 1The act by which something is thumbed.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how thumbing appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The precious autographs could not have endured through many a season the thumbings of "the book-holder" or the prompter.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "thumbing", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 8 letters (nearest by frequency rank).