worrying

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for worrying is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwʌɹ.i.ɪŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,927 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Inducing worry.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for worrying, with forms such as "owrrying", "worriyng", and "worryign". 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 4 confusable-pair relationships, "Worthing", "working", "wording", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From worry + -ing. 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 worrying, spelled W-O-R-R-Y-I-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.