wrong

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for wrong is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɹɒŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #409 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 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 wrong, with forms such as "rwong", "worng", and "wrnog". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "wrote", "wrongs", "wrongly", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English wrong, from Old English wrang (“wrong, twisted, uneven”), from Old Norse rangr, vrangr (“crooked, wrong”), from Proto-Germanic *wrangaz (“crooked, twisted, turned awry”), from Proto-Indo-European *werḱ-, *wrengʰ- (“to twist, weave, tie t… 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 wrong, spelled W-R-O-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.