hoodlum

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hoodlum is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhuːdləm/. Corpus data places it at rank #67,510 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No misspelling variants are generated for hoodlum 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: First attested in a December 1866 Daily Alta California article, which mentions "the 'Hoodlum Gang' of juvenile thieves". Several possible origins have been proposed. It may derive from a Germanic word like Swabian hudelum (“disorderly”) or Bavarian Haderlu… 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 hoodlum, spelled H-O-O-D-L-U-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.