ludicrous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ludicrous is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈluː.dɪ.kɹəs/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,614 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Idiotic or unthinkable, often to the point of being funny; amusing by being plainly incongruous or absurd.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for ludicrous, with forms such as "lduicrous", "lludicrous", and "ludcirous". 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 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: Learned borrowing from Latin lūdicrus. First attested in 1619. 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 ludicrous, spelled L-U-D-I-C-R-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.