weigh

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for weigh is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /weɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,303 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 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 weigh, with forms such as "ewigh", "wegih", and "weiggh". 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, "wig", "with", "wish", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English weyen, from Old English wegan, from Proto-West Germanic *wegan, from Proto-Germanic *weganą (“to move, carry, weigh”), from Proto-Indo-European *wéǵʰeti, from *weǵʰ- (“to bring, transport”). Cognates Cognate with Scots wey, wee, Dutch we… 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 weigh, spelled W-E-I-G-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.