hodad
"hodad" is a 5-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“hodad” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 5
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Someone who comes to the beach and has a surfboard, but never surfs, or that surfs poorly and annoys the local seasoned surfers.
Corpus desk
Index EN-hodad · hodad · English
hodad · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MID 5 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "H" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | hodad |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 5 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “hodad” in English
Rare enough to double-check
hodad is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Someone who comes to the beach and has a surfboard, but never surfs, or that surfs poorly and annoys the local seasoned surfers.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for hodad, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
Etymologically, the entry records: Originally Californian surfer slang from the 1960s. Perhaps from the greeting Ho! Dad, though no evidence for this derivation is known. The suggestion that it derives from Western Hemisphere Spanish jodido (“fucked, difficult, annoying”) similarly lacks evi… The correct English form is hodad, spelled H-O-D-A-D.
Definition
- 1Someone who comes to the beach and has a surfboard, but never surfs, or that surfs poorly and annoys the local seasoned surfers.
Etymology
Originally Californian surfer slang from the 1960s. Perhaps from the greeting Ho! Dad, though no evidence for this derivation is known. The suggestion that it derives from Western Hemisphere Spanish jodido (“fucked, difficult, annoying”) similarly lacks evidence; also the vowel change from -did to -dad is unexplained.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.