curfew

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for curfew is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈkɜː.fjuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #17,811 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for curfew, with forms such as "ccurfew", "crufew", and "cufrew". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "curve", "curse", "curie", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English curfu, from Old French cuevre-fu (French couvre-feu), from the imperative of covrir (“to cover”) + fu (“fire”). Compare kerchief. 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 curfew, spelled C-U-R-F-E-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.