shrew

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shrew is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃɹuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #39,560 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for shrew, with forms such as "hsrew", "sherw", and "shhrew". 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, "sure", "sore", "Shri", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English *schrewe, from Old English sċrēawa (“shrew”), from Proto-Germanic *skrawwaz (“thin; meagre; frail”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut; shorten; skimp”). Cognates include Old High German scrawaz (“dwarf”), Norwegian skrugg (“dwa… 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 shrew, spelled S-H-R-E-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.