guru

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for guru is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɡʊɹuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,340 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for guru, with forms such as "gguru", "gruu", and "gurru". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "guy", "gut", "Gus", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Hindi गुरु (guru) / Punjabi ਗੁਰੂ (gurū), from Sanskrit गुरु (guru, “venerable, respectable”), originally "heavy" and in this sense cognate to English grieve and, more distantly, brute. Doublet of grave. A traditional, though flawed etymology b… 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 guru, spelled G-U-R-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.