mammoth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mammoth is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmæməθ/. Corpus data places it at rank #17,180 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for mammoth, with forms such as "ammmoth", "mammoht", and "mammothh". 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: From obsolete Russian ма́мант (mámant), modern ма́монт (mámont), probably from a Uralic word, such as Proto-Mansi *mān-oŋt (“earth horn”). Possibly influenced by behemoth. Adjectival use was popularized in the early 1800s by references to the Cheshire Mammo… 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 mammoth, spelled M-A-M-M-O-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.