without fail
"without-fail" is a 11-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“without fail” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a prep_phrase. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 12
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Certainly; by all means; as a matter of importance.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | without fail |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Prep_phrase |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “without fail” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
without fail is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as aprep_phrase. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for without fail, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is without fail, spelled W-I-T-H-O-U-T- -F-A-I-L.
Definition
- 1Certainly; by all means; as a matter of importance.
- 2Inevitably.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “without fail”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is W-I-T-H-O-U-T- -F-A-I-L - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.