tink

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for tink is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tɪŋk/. Corpus data places it at rank #40,928 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To emit a high-pitched sharp or metallic noise.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for tink, with forms such as "itnk", "tikn", and "tinkk". 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, "TN", "TK", "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 tinken, possibly from Old English *tincian, equivalent to tin + -k. Compare Dutch tinken (“to tink, toll, strike the bells of a clock”), German Low German tinken (“to tink”). Compare also English ting. 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 tink, spelled T-I-N-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.