tough

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for tough is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /tʌf/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,777 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 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 tough, with forms such as "otugh", "toguh", and "touggh". 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, "tug", "tour", "tout", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English tough, towgh, tou, toȝ, from Old English tōh (“tough, tenacious, holding fast together; pliant; sticky, glutinous, clammy”), from Proto-West Germanic *tą̄h(ī), from Proto-Germanic *tanhuz (“fitting; clinging; tenacious; tough”), from Pro… 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 tough, spelled T-O-U-G-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.