young

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for young is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /jʌŋ/. Corpus data places it at rank #364 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for young, with forms such as "oyung", "yonug", and "yougn". 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 18 confusable-pair relationships, "Yun", "your", "yous", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English yong, yonge, from Old English ġeong, from Proto-West Germanic *jung, from Proto-Germanic *jungaz, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂yuHn̥ḱós, from *h₂yuh₁en- (“young”). Cognates Cognate with Alemannic German jung, jungu, junhs, jungà… 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 young, spelled Y-O-U-N-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.