virtuous

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for virtuous is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈvɜːt͡ʃʊəs/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,698 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Full of virtue; having excellent moral character.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for virtuous, with forms such as "ivrtuous", "virrtuous", and "virtouus". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "virtues", "virtuoso", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English vertuous, borrowed from Anglo-Norman vertuous, vertous, ultimately from Late Latin virtuōsus, from Latin virtūs. By surface analysis, virtue + -ous. Doublet of virtuoso and piecewise doublet of virtùous. 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 virtuous, spelled V-I-R-T-U-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.