hush-hush
"hush-hush" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“hush-hush” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Secret, not spoken of (or spoken of only in hushed whispers between insiders).
Corpus desk
Index EN-hush-hush · hush-hush · English
hush-hush · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 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 | hush-hush |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “hush-hush” in English
Rare enough to double-check
hush-hush is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Secret, not spoken of (or spoken of only in hushed whispers between insiders).".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for hush-hush, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is hush-hush, spelled H-U-S-H---H-U-S-H.
Definition
- 1Secret, not spoken of (or spoken of only in hushed whispers between insiders).
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how hush-hush appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The spy program was very hush-hush: no-one ever spoke of it.
The sex lottery went over big in its first try with number runners selling tickets and making the entire affair a very hush-hush production.
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.