hooch

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hooch is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /huːt͡ʃ/. Corpus data places it at rank #48,284 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "An alcoholic beverage, especially an inferior or illicit one and especially liquor such as whisky.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for hooch, with forms such as "hhooch", "hoch", and "hocoh". 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 18 confusable-pair relationships, "hook", "hood", "hoop", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Abbreviation of hoochinoo, name of a specific liquor, from Tlingit Xutsnoowú Ḵwáan, the group that produced it, from Hutsnuwu (“grizzly bear fort”), the name of the village on Admiralty Island in which they lived. From Tlingit xóots (“grizzly bear”). 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 hooch, spelled H-O-O-C-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.