shameful

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shameful is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈʃeɪmfəl/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,608 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 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for shameful, with forms such as "hsameful", "sahmeful", and "shaemful". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "shamefully", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English schameful, schamfull, from Old English *sċeamfull, sċeomfull, equivalent to shame + -ful. Cognate with Danish skamfuld (“shameful, shamefast, ashamed”). 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 shameful, spelled S-H-A-M-E-F-U-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.