shame

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shame is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃeɪm/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,761 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for shame, with forms such as "hsame", "sahme", and "shaem". 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, "she", "SME", "some", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English schame, from Old English sċamu, from Proto-Germanic *skamō. Cognates *German Scham (“shame”) *German Low German Schaam (“shame, shamefacedness”) *Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Swedish skam (“shame”) *Faroese skomm (“shame,… 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 shame, spelled S-H-A-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.