today

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for today is 5 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /təˈdeɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #258 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for today, with forms such as "otday", "tdoay", and "toady". 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, "toy", "Tony", "Todd", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English today, to-daie, todæig, from Old English tōdæġ, tō dæġe (“today”, literally “on [the/this] day, [this] day forward”), equivalent to to + day. Compare Saterland Frisian däälich (“today”), Dutch vandaag (“today”), Old Saxon hindag (“today”… 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 today, spelled T-O-D-A-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.