once bitten, twice shy

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The Portuguese entry for once bitten, twice shy is 22 letters long, classified as aphrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wʌns ˈbɪtən twais ʃaɪ/. 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: "gato escaldado de água fria tem medo, cachorro picado por cobra tem medo de linguiça".

No misspelling variants are generated for once bitten, twice shy in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable Portuguese 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.

No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct Portuguese form is once bitten, twice shy, spelled O-N-C-E- -B-I-T-T-E-N-,- -T-W-I-C-E- -S-H-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.