sou'wester
"sou-wester" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“sou'wester” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Alternative form of southwester (“wind”).
Corpus desk
Index EN-sou-wester · sou'wester · English
sou'wester · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 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 | sou'wester |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “sou'wester” in English
Rare enough to double-check
sou'wester is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
No misspelling variants are generated for sou'wester in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. Our dataset records no confusable match here, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
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 sou'wester, spelled S-O-U-'-W-E-S-T-E-R.
Definition
- 1Alternative form of southwester (“wind”).
- 2Alternative form of southwester (“waterproof hat”).
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how sou'wester appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
For a spell we done pretty well. Then there came a reg'lar terror of a sou'wester same as you don't get one summer in a thousand, and blowed the shanty flat and ripped about half of the weir poles out of the sand.
As he sat there with a sou'wester down over his ears, in a long pilot coat, his figure appeared in the misty morning air to assume quite supernatural proportions, and you might almost imagine that you had one of the old Vikings before you.
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.