scourge

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for scourge is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /skɜːd͡ʒ/. Corpus data places it at rank #22,807 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 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for scourge, with forms such as "csourge", "sccourge", and "scoruge". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "surge", "source", "splurge", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English scourge (“a lash, whip, scourge; affliction, calamity; person who causes affliction or calamity; shoot of a vine”), and then either: * from Anglo-Norman scorge, escorge, escurge, or Old French scurge, escourge, escorge, escorgiee, escurg… 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 scourge, spelled S-C-O-U-R-G-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.