cargo-cult-science

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for cargo cult science is 18 letters long, classified as anoun. 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: "Practices which have the appearance of being scientific, but do not actually follow the scientific method.".

No misspelling variants are generated for cargo cult science in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English 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.

Etymologically, the entry records: Coined by American physicist Richard Feynman in 1974 in his commencement address at Caltech, in reference to cargo cults. 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 cargo cult science, spelled C-A-R-G-O- -C-U-L-T- -S-C-I-E-N-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.