worth-one-s-salt

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for worth one's salt is 16 letters long, classified as an adjective, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈwɜːθ wʌnz ˈsɒlt/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Adept or competent, especially at one's occupation.".

No misspelling variants are generated for worth one's salt in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in 1805. Perhaps referencing the derivation of the word salary from Latin sal (“salt”), which is correct (though the related idea that soldiers were paid in salt is not). Or more generally from the fact that salt was a fairly valuable commodi… 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 worth one's salt, spelled W-O-R-T-H- -O-N-E-'-S- -S-A-L-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.