eschew

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for eschew is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɛsˈt͡ʃuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #48,730 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To avoid; to shun, to shy away from.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for eschew, with forms such as "ecshew", "escchew", and "escehw". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "Esther", "etched", "escrow", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English eschewen, from Anglo-Norman eschiver, (third-person present eschiu), from Frankish *skiuhijan (“to dread, shun, avoid”); thus a doublet of skew. For the pronunciation with /ʃ/, compare the development of marshal from Middle English marsc… 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 eschew, spelled E-S-C-H-E-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.