segue

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for segue is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈsɛɡweɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #49,626 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 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for segue, with forms such as "esgue", "segeu", and "seggue". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "sue", "sense", "serve", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Italian segue (“it follows”), from seguire (“to follow”), from Latin sequor; originally a term used in a musical score to indicate that the next movement or passage is to follow without a break. Cognate with Spanish seguir. Doublet of sue. Rel… 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 segue, spelled S-E-G-U-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.