adieu

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for adieu is 5 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈdju/. Corpus data places it at rank #35,604 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Said to wish a final farewell; goodbye.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for adieu, with forms such as "addieu", "adeiu", and "adiue". 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 12 confusable-pair relationships, "Arie", "alien", "Ariel", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English adieu also adew, adewe, adue, from Old French adieu (“to God”), a shortening of a Dieu vous comant (“I commend you to God”), from Medieval Latin ad Deum (“to God”). Doublet of adios. 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 adieu, spelled A-D-I-E-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.