mulligan

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for mulligan is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmʌlɪɡən/. Corpus data places it at rank #26,178 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 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for mulligan, with forms such as "mluligan", "mmulligan", and "muligan". 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, "Milligan", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Attested since the 1930s in the sense “chance to re-take a golf stroke”; probably from the name Mulligan, after a golfer who replayed a stroke. See Wikipedia for more information. 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 mulligan, spelled M-U-L-L-I-G-A-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.