typhoon
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "typhoon", 7-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "typhoon" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "typhoon" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
typhoon is aEnglishnoun. It means: A severe tropical cyclone; an intense, rotating storm. Pronounced /taɪˈfuːn/. Often confused with tycoon and typhoid.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | typhoon |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /taɪˈfuːn/ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #13,261 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 2 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for typhoon is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /taɪˈfuːn/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,261 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 generated misspelling index lists 11 likely wrong-spelling variants for typhoon, with forms such as "tpyhoon", "ttyphoon", and "tyhpoon". 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 also participates in 2 confusable-pair relationships, "tycoon", "typhoid", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: English texts mention typhon, tiphon as a Greek word for "whirlwind" since at least the 1550s, referring to Ancient Greek τυφῶν (tuphôn), τυφώς (tuphṓs, “whirlwind”) (the latter attested since Aeschylus), Τυφῶν (Tuphôn, “Typhon, father of the winds”). (Fren… 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 typhoon, spelled T-Y-P-H-O-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A severe tropical cyclone; an intense, rotating storm.
- 2A weather phenomenon in the northwestern Pacific that is precisely equivalent to a hurricane except for its geographical region, typically resulting in wind speeds of 64 knots (119 km/h) or above. Equivalent to a cyclone in the Indian Ocean and Indonesia and Australia.
Etymology
English texts mention typhon, tiphon as a Greek word for "whirlwind" since at least the 1550s, referring to Ancient Greek τυφῶν (tuphôn), τυφώς (tuphṓs, “whirlwind”) (the latter attested since Aeschylus), Τυφῶν (Tuphôn, “Typhon, father of the winds”). (French typhon (“whirlwind”) is said to be attested since 1504.) However, the first use of it as an English word for a whirlwind or storm dates to 1588, in the spelling Touffon, in the specific sense "giant storm in the Pacific"; this sense first appears in Europe in the mid 16th century in Portuguese tufão (attested since at least 1560), whence it entered English. Portuguese sailors likely got the word from Arabic طُوفَان (ṭūfān) (compare Persian طوفان (tufân), Hindi तूफ़ान (tūfān)), and some spellings of the English word (like tufan) seem to derive from that Arabic word. The Arabic word's origin is sometimes thought to be Sinitic 大風／大风 ("big wind", Mandarin dàfēng, Cantonese daai6 fung1 /taːi̯²² fʊŋ⁵⁵/, Hakka thai-fûng /tʰai̯⁵⁵ fuŋ²⁴/), and some English forms like tyfoong, tyfung are from or were modified based on Chinese. However, the Arabic word may be entirely Semitic from the native root ط و ف (ṭ w f) in the sense of the wind circling around, or it might derive from Greek. (Some sources even suggest the term originated in Greek and travelled via Arabic to Chinese before making its way back into Arabic and back to Europe.) Over time, the spelling of the word in English was influenced by the Greek word.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: tpyhoon,ttyphoon,tyhpoon,typhhoon,typhon,typhono,typhoonn,typohon,typphoon,tyyphoon,ytphoon
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for typhoon
Misspelling Variants of "typhoon"
Frequency rank: #13,261 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter T in our English index: