obtuse

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for obtuse is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əbˈtjuːs/. Corpus data places it at rank #27,588 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for obtuse, with forms such as "botuse", "obbtuse", and "obtsue". 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, "obese", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English obtuse, from Latin obtūsus (“blunt, dull; obtuse”), past participle of obtundere, from obtundō (“to batter, beat, strike; to blunt, dull”), from ob- (“against”) (see ob-) + tundō (“to beat, strike; to bruise, crush, pound”) (ultimately f… 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 obtuse, spelled O-B-T-U-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.