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shut-up

Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.

Letters

7 characters

Language

English

word origin

Source

Wiktionary

open dictionary

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Detailed reference entry for the English word "shut-up", 7-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "shut-up" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "shut-up" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.

shut up is aEnglishverb. It means: To close (a building) so that no one can enter. Pronounced /ʃʌt ʌp/.

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Key facts for shut up
PropertyValue
Headwordshut up
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechVerb
IPA/ʃʌt ʌp/
Letters7
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

shut up is not present in the top-100,000 ranked English corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for shut up is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃʌt ʌp/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No misspelling variants are generated for shut up in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is shut up, spelled S-H-U-T- -U-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    To close (a building) so that no one can enter.
  2. 2
    To terminate (a business).
  3. 3
    To put (someone or something) in a secure enclosed space, such as a room or container.
  4. 4
    Of a person, to stop talking (said by someone, often one in authority, after one has said something annoying, irrelevant, or false, during a period of peace and quiet, or when one is not allowed to talk) or arguing, or (of a person or thing) making noise.
  5. 5
    To murder, kill.

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "shut up"?
"shut up" is spelled S-H-U-T- -U-P. The IPA pronunciation is /ʃʌt ʌp/.
What does "shut up" mean?
As a verb, "shut up" means: To close (a building) so that no one can enter.
How do you pronounce "shut up"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "shut up" is /ʃʌt ʌp/. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "shut up" come from?
"shut up" is a English word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Nearby English words

Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index:

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Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.