very

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for very is 4 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈvɛɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #106 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 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for very, with forms such as "evry", "verry", and "veryy". 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, "VR", "vet", "vex", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English verray, from Old French verai (“true”), from Early Medieval Latin vērāgus, from Classical Latin vērāx, derived from vērus, from Proto-Italic *wēros, from Proto-Indo-European *weh₁ros. Distantly cognate with the Old English wǣr (“true”). … 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 very, spelled V-E-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.