touch the hem of someone's garment

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for touch the hem of someone's garment is 34 letters long, classified as a verb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To give respect or reverence to someone; to express servitude to someone; to draw strength or comfort from someone who is superior.".

No misspelling variants are generated for touch the hem of someone's garment in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: An allusion to the Biblical tale (Matthew 9:20) of the woman who was cured of disease when she touched the hem of Christ's garment. 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 touch the hem of someone's garment, spelled T-O-U-C-H- -T-H-E- -H-E-M- -O-F- -S-O-M-E-O-N-E-'-S- -G-A-R-M-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.