hei-tiki

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hei-tiki is 8 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌhæeˈtiki/. 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: "An ornamental pendant (typically made of pounamu or greenstone) among the Māori, worn around the neck, representing a human figure traditionally connected with Tiki, the first human in Maori mythol...".

No misspelling variants are generated for hei-tiki 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: Borrowed from Māori heitiki, from hei (“to tie around the neck; scarf, pendant”) + tiki (“carving of a human figure”). 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 hei-tiki, spelled H-E-I---T-I-K-I, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.