Dont

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. An informal, unapostrophized way of writing the contraction of the words do and not, used to express a negative instruction or statement
2. A casual misspelling that stands for the contraction of do not, leaving out the apostrophe that normally marks the dropped letter
3. Written shorthand for the negative form of do, commonly seen online or in texts where the apostrophe has been omitted

Etymology: "Dont" is simply the spelling of "don't" with the apostrophe left out, so its history is really the history of the contraction. "Don't" is formed from the verb "do" plus the negative suffix "-n't", a shortened form of "not" that attached itself to auxiliary verbs and gradually fused with them into single words such as "can't", "won't" and "isn't". The apostrophe marks the dropped letter, and in "don't" that letter is the "o" of "not". The vowel in "do" is pronounced to rhyme with "moo", while the contracted "don't" in ordinary speech has a different vowel, so the spelling and sound of the contraction do not match perfectly. Dropping the apostrophe makes the word look even more like a bare "don" plus "t", which is why readers encounter it mainly in casual writing, text messages and informal notes. In some dialects, "dont" also appears in forms like "he dont", where speakers either treat "does" as the negated form or skip the third-person "-s" entirely. Both patterns are old, widely heard and found in many regional varieties.