tomb

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for tomb is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tuːm/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,495 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for tomb, with forms such as "otmb", "tmob", and "tobm". 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, "too", "top", "toy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English tombe, toumbe, borrowed from Old French tombe, from Latin tumba from Ancient Greek τύμβος (túmbos, “a sepulchral mound, tomb, grave”), probably from Proto-Indo-European *tewh₂- (“to swell”). The verb is from Middle English tomben. 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 tomb, spelled T-O-M-B, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.