marijuana

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for marijuana is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌmɛɹɪˈwɑ.nə/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,142 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for marijuana, with forms such as "amrijuana", "mairjuana", and "marijauna". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "Mariana", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Mexican Spanish marihuana, from mariguana. First attested in 1874 in the publications of Hubert Howe Bancroft. Altered by influence of a folk etymology involving the proper name María Juana (“Mary Jane”). 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 marijuana, spelled M-A-R-I-J-U-A-N-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.