worry

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for worry is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwʌ.ɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,548 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for worry, with forms such as "owrry", "worryy", and "wory". 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, "wry", "Wray", "wort", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English worien, werien, wirien, wirwen, wyryȝen (“to choke, strangle”), from Old English wyrġan, from Proto-Germanic *wurgijaną, from Proto-Indo-European *werǵʰ- (“bind, squeeze”). Cognate with Dutch worgen, wurgen, German würgen. Compare Latin … 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 worry, spelled W-O-R-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.