koala

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for koala is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /koʊˈɑː.lə/. Corpus data places it at rank #27,532 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A tree-dwelling marsupial, Phascolarctos cinereus, that resembles a small bear with a broad head, large ears and sharp claws, mainly found in eastern Australia.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for koala, with forms such as "kaola", "kkoala", and "koaal". 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 17 confusable-pair relationships, "kool", "Kona", "Kohl", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Dharug gula or gulawany. 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 koala, spelled K-O-A-L-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.