ostrich-politics

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ostrich politics is 16 letters long, classified as a noun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A style of politics that evades rather than addresses problems; ostrichism.".

No misspelling variants are generated for ostrich politics in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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: From ostrich + politics, calque of German Vogel-Strauß-Politik. Named after the common misconception that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when confronted with danger. First attested in the late 19th century. 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 ostrich politics, spelled O-S-T-R-I-C-H- -P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.