sup

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for sup is 3 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sʌp/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,818 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "To sip; to take a small amount of food or drink into the mouth, especially with a spoon.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for sup in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "SW", "SV", "Sy", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: The verb is from Middle English soupen, from Old English sūpan (“to sip, drink, taste”), from Proto-Germanic *sūpaną (compare Dutch zuipen (“to drink, tipple, booze”), German saufen (“to drink, booze”), Swedish supa (“to drink, swallow”)), from Proto-Indo-E… 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 sup, spelled S-U-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.