ragu

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for ragù is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈɹaɡuː/. 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: "An Italian pasta sauce containing ground meat cooked with sautéed vegetables in tomato sauce or some other kind of liquid.".

No misspelling variants are generated for ragù 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 Italian ragù, from French ragoût, from Middle French ragoûter (“to awaken the appetite”), from goût (“taste”), from Latin gustus. Doublet of ragout. 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 ragù, spelled R-A-G-Ù, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.