wort

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for wort is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wɜːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #33,912 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 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 wort, with forms such as "owrt", "worrt", and "wortt". 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, "wt", "wow", "wot", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: PIE word *wréh₂ds From Middle English wort, wurt, wyrte (“any herb or plant; herb or plant used as food or medicine; (specifically) cabbage or vegetable of the genus Brassica; (chiefly plural) dish of cooked vegetables”) [and other forms], from Old English… 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 wort, spelled W-O-R-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.