demure

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for demure is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɪˈmjʊə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #49,286 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 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for demure, with forms such as "ddemure", "demmure", and "demrue". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "deuce", "desire", "deluxe", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Inherited from Middle English demure, demwre, an abbreviation of Anglo-Norman de mure port (“with a mature demeanor”) (compare Old French meur from Latin mātūrus): *si il seyt coy e de mure port (Amur curteiz) (“he sits quietly and with a mature appearance”… 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 demure, spelled D-E-M-U-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.