hungry

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hungry is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈhʌŋ.ɡɹi/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,307 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for hungry, with forms such as "hhungry", "hnugry", and "hugnry". 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 7 confusable-pair relationships, "hurry", "hunky", "hung", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English hungry, from Old English hungriġ, from Proto-West Germanic *hungrug, from Proto-Germanic *hungrugaz (“hungry”); equivalent to hunger + -y. Cognate with West Frisian hongerich (“hungry”), Dutch hongerig (“hungry”), German hungrig (“hungry… 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 hungry, spelled H-U-N-G-R-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.