shaman

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shaman is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈʃɑːmən/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,932 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 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 shaman, with forms such as "hsaman", "sahman", and "shaamn". 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, "shan", "shame", "Shawn", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from German Schamane, from Russian шама́н (šamán), from Evenki шама̄н (şamān), сама̄н (samān), from Proto-Tungusic *samān. The Evenki word is possibly derived from the root ша- (şa-, “to know”); or else a loanword from Tocharian B ṣamāne (“monk”) o… 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 shaman, spelled S-H-A-M-A-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.