women

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for women is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwɪm.ɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #245 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "plural of woman".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for women, with forms such as "owmen", "wmoen", and "woemn". 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, "won", "wore", "worn", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English wimmen, from Old English wīfmenn (“women”), from wīf (“female”) + menn (“men, persons, human beings”), equivalent to wife + men. Spelling (with o) influenced by the singular; see woman for more. 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 women, spelled W-O-M-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.