vole

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for vole is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /vəʊl/. Corpus data places it at rank #45,158 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Any of a large number of species of small rodents of the tribes Arvicolini, Ellobiusini, Clethrionomyini, Pliomyini, Phenacomyini and Prometheomyini.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for vole, with forms such as "ovle", "vloe", and "voel". 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, "vow", "vox", "Vos", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Norn vollj, from Old Norse vǫllr (“field”), from Proto-Germanic *walþuz (“forest”). The Orkney dialectal term vole mouse, lit. “field mouse”, was introduced to general English by George Barry in 1805; John Fleming in 1828 was first to refer to… 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 vole, spelled V-O-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.