shoot 'em up
"shoot-em-up" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“shoot 'em up” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 12
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A piece of media which depicts considerable gunplay.
Corpus desk
Index EN-shoot-em-up · shoot 'em up · English
shoot 'em up · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 12 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | shoot 'em up |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “shoot 'em up” in English
Rare enough to double-check
shoot 'em up is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for shoot 'em up, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. Our dataset records no confusable match here, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
No documented word history exists for this headword, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is shoot 'em up, spelled S-H-O-O-T- -'-E-M- -U-P.
Definition
- 1A piece of media which depicts considerable gunplay.
- 2A piece of media which depicts considerable gunplay.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how shoot 'em up appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
My wife won't watch this movie; it's a shoot ’em up.
The arcaders have it easy. All they need to do is drop a quarter into a machine to find out how good the latest shoot 'em up game really is. But for the home computer owner, it's another story.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.