shallow

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shallow is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈʃæl.oʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,733 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for shallow, with forms such as "hsallow", "sahllow", and "shalloww". 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, "shalom", "swallow", "shallows", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English schalowe (“not deep, shallow”); apparently related to Middle English schalde, schold, scheld, schealde (“shallow”), from Old English sċeald (“shallow”), from Proto-Germanic *skal-, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelh₁- (“to parch, dry out”… 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 shallow, spelled S-H-A-L-L-O-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.