ou

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ou is 2 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈəʊ.uː/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,099 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A probably extinct species of Hawaiian honeycreeper, Psittirostra psittacea.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for ou in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "oz", "ow", "ox", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Hawaiian ʻōʻū. 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 ou, spelled O-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.