hideous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hideous is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhɪd.i.əs/. Corpus data places it at rank #16,042 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 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 hideous, with forms such as "hdieous", "hhideous", and "hiddeous". 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, "hides", "hideout", "Hideo", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hidous, from Anglo-Norman hidous, from Old French hideus, hydus (“that which inspires terror”), from earlier hisdos, from Old French hisda (“horror, fear”), of uncertain and disputed origin. Probably from Proto-West Germanic *agisiþu (“h… 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 hideous, spelled H-I-D-E-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.