worst

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for worst is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wɜːst/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,259 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for worst, with forms such as "owrst", "worrst", and "worsst". 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, "wot", "writ", "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 worste, wurste, warste, werste, wirste, from Old English wierrest, from Proto-Germanic *wirsistaz, superlative form of *ubilaz (“bad, evil”); compare worse. Cognate with Old Saxon wirsista, wirrista (“worst”), Old High German wirst, wirs… 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 worst, spelled W-O-R-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.