shalom

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shalom is 6 letters long, classified as anintj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃɑːˈloʊm/. Corpus data places it at rank #29,082 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A traditional Jewish greeting or farewell.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for shalom, with forms such as "hsalom", "sahlom", and "shallom". 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 14 confusable-pair relationships, "sham", "shalt", "Sharon", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Hebrew שָׁלוֹם (šālóm, “peace, well-being; Hello, good-bye”). Doublet of salaam, the same word via Arabic. 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 shalom, spelled S-H-A-L-O-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.