woe-is-me

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for woe is me is 9 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌwəʊ ɪz ˈmiː/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Used to show that the speaker feels distress or misery.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for woe is me in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

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 “… 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 woe is me, spelled W-O-E- -I-S- -M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.