mou

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mou is 3 letters long, classified as aparticle. Corpus data places it at rank #25,145 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Sentence-final particle, forms a tag question.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for mou in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "my", "Mr", "MS", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Cantonese 冇 (mou5), also influenced by Malay mau variant of mahu (“to want”). 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 mou, spelled M-O-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.