shogun

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shogun is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈʃəʊɡʌn/. Corpus data places it at rank #33,415 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The supreme generalissimo of feudal Japan.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for shogun, with forms such as "hsogun", "shgoun", and "shhogun". 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, "shun", "shown", "shout", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Japanese 将軍 (shōgun), itself the short form of 征夷大将軍 (seii taishōgun, literally “general who overcomes the barbarians”), ultimately from Middle Chinese. Doublet of jiangjun. 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 shogun, spelled S-H-O-G-U-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.