shrewd

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shrewd is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃɹuːd/. Corpus data places it at rank #25,204 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for shrewd, with forms such as "hsrewd", "sherwd", and "shhrewd". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "spread", "shroud", "strewn", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English schrewed (“depraved; wicked”, literally “accursed”), from schrewen (“to curse; beshrew”), from schrewe, schrowe, screwe (“evil or wicked person/thing”), from Old English sċrēawa (“wicked person”, literally “biter”). Equivalent to shrew +… 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 shrewd, spelled S-H-R-E-W-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.