manitou

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for manitou is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmanɪtuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #60,262 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A god or spirit as the object of religious awe or ritual among some American Indians.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for manitou in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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 Pidgin Delaware Manétto, from Unami manëtu and Munsee manútoow, later influenced by French manitou, from Cree/Montagnais manito꞉w; from Proto-Algonquian *maneto·wa (“supernatural being”). 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 manitou, spelled M-A-N-I-T-O-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.