taboo

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for taboo is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /təˈbuː/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,715 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 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 taboo, with forms such as "atboo", "tabboo", and "tabo". 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 18 confusable-pair relationships, "too", "tao", "taco", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Tongan tapu (“prohibited, sacred”), from Proto-Polynesian *tapu, from Proto-Oceanic *tabu, from Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian *tambu. Doublet of kapu. First attested in c. 1777. The p in the Tongan source was misheard as b. 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 taboo, spelled T-A-B-O-O, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.