askew

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for askew is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈskju/. Corpus data places it at rank #40,561 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 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 askew, with forms such as "aksew", "asekw", and "askeww". 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 16 confusable-pair relationships, "asks", "asset", "asses", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Old Norse á ská (“askew, askance”), equivalent to a- + skew. Compare Icelandic á ská (“diagonally”), Danish skrå (“slanting, oblique”), German Schräge (“slope, slant”). 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 askew, spelled A-S-K-E-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.