cough

The filled squares are the 2 vowels — 2 of 5 letters. In the size-ranked list, cough sits in the everyday tier.

Letters

58,636 words share the length

Syllables

1stress on the first

Anagrams

0none in this dictionary

One letter away

8bough, couch

• nouna sudden noisy expulsion of air from the lungs that clears the air passages; a common symptom of upper respiratory infection or bronchitis or pneumonia or tuberculosis
• verbexhale abruptly, as when one has a chest cold or congestion

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary reads it as k aa1 f — one syllable, the stress on syllable 1.

4 words share everything from the last stressed vowel on — that is what counts as a rhyme here.

• coif
• pilaf
• quaff
• haaf

No other word in this dictionary uses exactly these 5 letters.

• bough
• couch
• dough
• rough
• tough
• lough
• sough
• couth

Same length, one position changed. <1% of the 8,636 words this long are a neighbour.

• 5 letter words8,636
• Starts C16,229
• Starts CO6,432
• Ends H
• 5 letters starting C

Tier: everyday. The tiers come from the English Speller Database and rank by list size, not by how often a word is used — see where the words come from.