sudoku

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sudoku is 6 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sʊˈdəʊku/. Corpus data places it at rank #45,107 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A type of pencil puzzle played on a square grid, requiring each of the columns, each of the rows, and each of the subregions (called "boxes" or "regions") to contain the lowest whole numbers up to ...".

Our generated misspelling index lists 8 likely wrong-spelling variants for sudoku, with forms such as "sduoku", "ssudoku", and "suddoku". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. 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.

Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Japanese 数(すう)字(じ) (sūji) Japanese は (wa) Japanese 独(どく)身(しん) (dokushin) Japanese に (ni) Japanese 限(かぎ)る (kagiru) Japanese 数独 (sūdoku)bor. English sudoku Borrowed from Japanese 数独 (sūdoku). 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 sudoku, spelled S-U-D-O-K-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.