tit
/tɪt/
"tit" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“tit” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #15,533 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #15,533
- frequency rank, English
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A person's breast or nipple.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | tit |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /tɪt/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #15,533 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “tit” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for tit is 3 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tɪt/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,533 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Zero misspellings are on record for tit in our index, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "to", "TV", "TL", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English tit, titte, tette, from Old English tit, titt, from Proto-West Germanic *titt, from Proto-Germanic *tittaz (“teat; nipple; breast”), of expressive origin. Perhaps related to an original meaning “to suck”; compare Proto-Indo-European *dʰe… The correct English form is tit, spelled T-I-T.
Definition
- 1A person's breast or nipple.
- 2An animal's teat or udder.
- 3An idiot; a fool.
- 4A police officer; a "tithead".
Etymology
From Middle English tit, titte, tette, from Old English tit, titt, from Proto-West Germanic *titt, from Proto-Germanic *tittaz (“teat; nipple; breast”), of expressive origin. Perhaps related to an original meaning “to suck”; compare Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁-y-. Doublet of teat, which was borrowed from Old French. Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Tit, Dutch tiet, dialectal Dutch tet, German Zitze, Titte, Hunsrik Ditz, Yiddish ציצע (tsitse).
This word in other languages
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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Using “tit”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is T-I-T - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /tɪt/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “to” - see the side-by-side comparison. tit vs to
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.