worse

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for worse is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wɜːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,381 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "comparative form of bad: more bad".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for worse, with forms such as "owrse", "wores", and "worrse". 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, "wort", "wove", "worth", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English worse, werse, from Old English wiersa, from Proto-West Germanic *wirsiʀō, from Proto-Germanic *wirsizô. Cognate with Dutch wers (“worse”). 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 worse, spelled W-O-R-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.