uncouth
/ʌnˈkuːθ/adjective
uncouth is spelled U-N-C-O-U-T-H. The wrong spelling people search most is uncooth: about 130 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 18 of all searches for the word. Uncouth is an adjective meaning “Clumsy, awkward”.
How many letters and syllables are in uncouth?
| Letters | 7: U-N-C-O-U-T-H |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 2 (from its American pronunciation) |
| In writing | about once in every 3 million words; the 51,738th most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, uncooth, about 130 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).
How do you spell uncouth?
Uncouth is spelled U-N-C-O-U-T-H. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 18 of the searches for uncouth in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is uncouth?
Uncouth appears about once in every 3 million words in written English, the 51,738th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce uncouth?
- /ʌnˈkuːθ/
Uncouth has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Back_ache-uncouth.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of uncouth
- uncouther comparative
- more uncouth comparative
- uncouthest superlative
- most uncouth superlative
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does uncouth mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
adjective
- 1
archaicUnfamiliar, strange, foreign.
- 2
Clumsy, awkward.
- 3
Unrefined, crude.
I don't want to associate with uncouth people.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Uncouth in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | étranger , rustre |
| German | fremd, fremdartig, sonderbar , tölpelhaft, schwerfällig, ungeschickt |
| Portuguese | estranho, esquisito , bruto , desajeitado |
| Spanish | extraño , grosero, basto, chocarrero , bruto, torpe |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does uncouth come from?
From Middle English uncouth, from Old English uncūþ (“unknown; unfamiliar; strange”), from Proto-West Germanic *unkunþ, from Proto-Germanic *unkunþaz (“unknown”), equivalent to un- + couth. The modern pronunciation does not show /aʊ/, the usual development of the Middle English vowel from the Great Vowel Shift. It is usually explained as a pronunciation taken from Northern English dialects, which did not undergo the diphthongization of the vowel.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).