muggins
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
7 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "muggins", 7-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "muggins" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "muggins" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
muggins is aEnglishnoun. It means: A fool or idiot (especially as an ironic way of referring to oneself). Pronounced /ˈmʌ.ɡɪnz/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | muggins |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈmʌ.ɡɪnz/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for muggins is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmʌ.ɡɪnz/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for muggins 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: Origin unknown. Sense 'fool' originally British slang of 1770s, probably an extension of earlier mug (“fool”). Game senses perhaps from surname Muggins. 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 muggins, spelled M-U-G-G-I-N-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A fool or idiot (especially as an ironic way of referring to oneself).
- 2The act of stealing another player's points because they either mispegged or counted up incorrectly.
- 3A game of dominoes in which the object is to make the sum of the two ends of the line some multiple of five.
- 4A card game based on building in suits or matching exposed cards, the object being to get rid of one's cards.
Etymology
Origin unknown. Sense 'fool' originally British slang of 1770s, probably an extension of earlier mug (“fool”). Game senses perhaps from surname Muggins.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: