tempeh

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for tempeh is 6 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈtɛmpeɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #75,481 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "An Indonesian food made from partially-cooked soybeans fermented by a fungus (either Rhizopus oligosporus or Rhizopus oryzae).".

No misspelling variants are generated for tempeh in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. 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: From Indonesian tempe, possibly from Old Javanese tumpi (“a food made from starch and tempeh”), or Indonesian tapai (“fermentation”). 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 tempeh, spelled T-E-M-P-E-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.