hindu

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for Hindu is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhɪnduː/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,138 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Of, or relating to Hinduism, or to Hindus and their culture.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for Hindu, with forms such as "hhindu", "hidnu", and "hinddu". 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 16 confusable-pair relationships, "hint", "hing", "honda", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Derived from Classical Persian هِنْدُو (hindū, “Indian, Hindu”), from Middle Persian hndwk' (Hindūg, “Indian”), from hnd (Hind, “India”), from Old Persian 𐏃𐎡𐎯𐎢 (hiⁿdu-, “India”), from Sanskrit सिन्धु (síndhu, “river, stream; Indus”), from Proto-Indo-Ary… 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 Hindu, spelled H-I-N-D-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.