woe is me
/ˌwəʊ ɪz ˈmiː/
"woe-is-me" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“woe is me” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an interjection. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Used to show that the speaker feels distress or misery.
Corpus desk
Index EN-woe-is-me · woe is me · English
woe is me · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "W" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | woe is me |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Interjection |
| IPA | /ˌwəʊ ɪz ˈmiː/ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “woe is me” in English
Rare enough to double-check
woe is me is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as aninterjection, transcribed /ˌwəʊ ɪz ˈmiː/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Used to show that the speaker feels distress or misery.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for woe is me, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. Our dataset records no confusable match here, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
Etymologically, the entry records: Here, the oblique pronoun me denotes not an informal copulative complement (as in this is me), but an indirect object, wherefore it literally means woe is to me, an obsolete way of saying I feel woe; compare German mir ist traurig (“I feel sad”, literally “… The correct English form is woe is me, spelled W-O-E- -I-S- -M-E.
Definition
- 1Used to show that the speaker feels distress or misery.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how woe is me appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Blasted with extasie. Oh, woe is me, T'haue seene what I haue seene: see what I see.
Woe is me, that I soiourne in Mesech: that I dwell in the tents of Kedar.
Etymology
Here, the oblique pronoun me denotes not an informal copulative complement (as in this is me), but an indirect object, wherefore it literally means woe is to me, an obsolete way of saying I feel woe; compare German mir ist traurig (“I feel sad”, literally “to-me [it] is sad”). Idiomatically, it means woe is upon me. See also German weh ist mir and its descendant, Yiddish וויי איז מיר (vey iz mir), which are identical in form and meaning to the English expression.
Antonyms
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.