spew

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for spew is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /spjuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #33,028 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for spew, with forms such as "psew", "sepw", and "speww". 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, "SW", "spy", "sue", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English spewen, from Old English spīwan, from Proto-West Germanic *spīwan, from Proto-Germanic *spīwaną, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ptyēw- (“to spit, vomit”). Germanic cognates include English spit, West Frisian spije, Dutch spuien, Dutch spuw… 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 spew, spelled S-P-E-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.