myrrh

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for myrrh is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /mɜːɹ/. Corpus data places it at rank #49,515 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for myrrh, with forms such as "mmyrrh", "mryrh", and "myrh". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "myth", "Marr", "Myra", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English mirre, from Old English myrre, from Latin myrrha, from Ancient Greek μύρρα (múrrha), from Semitic. Compare Arabic مُرّ (murr, “myrrh”, literally “bitterness”), Hebrew מור / מֹר (mōr, “myrrh”, literally “bitterness”). Compare מרור : maror. 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 myrrh, spelled M-Y-R-R-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.