Windrush
"windrush" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“Windrush” is uncommon English (frequency #83,902 among 12,113 “W” headwords), classed as a proper noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #83,902
- frequency rank, English
- 12,113
- “W” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A river in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, England, a tributary of the Thames.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | Windrush |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #83,902 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “Windrush” sits in English frequency
Rare enough to double-check
Windrush is uncommon English at frequency #83,902 among 12,113 “W” headwords, classed as aproper noun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 5 senses are on record.
Windrush doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Etymologically, the entry records: First attested in the Domesday Book as Old English Wenric, from Old Welsh gwynn (“white”) + reisko (“fen”). More recent senses derive from the ship HMT Empire Windrush, named after the River Windrush. The arrival of 802 immigrants to the UK from the West In… The correct English form is Windrush, spelled W-I-N-D-R-U-S-H.
Definition
- 1A river in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, England, a tributary of the Thames.
- 2A village and civil parish in Cotswold district, Gloucestershire, named after the river (OS grid ref SP1913).
- 3The first significant wave of immigration of British African-Caribbean people in the 1940s and 1950s.
- 4The Windrush scandal; the wrongful deportation of British citizens from the UK in the 2010s, especially of Caribbean immigrants belonging to the Windrush generation.
- 5The Windrush line on the London Overground.
Etymology
First attested in the Domesday Book as Old English Wenric, from Old Welsh gwynn (“white”) + reisko (“fen”). More recent senses derive from the ship HMT Empire Windrush, named after the River Windrush. The arrival of 802 immigrants to the UK from the West Indies onboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 is seen as symbolic of the beginning of mass immigration from the Caribbean to the UK. The Windrush line was named for its running through several parts of London with large British Caribbean population.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “Windrush”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is W-I-N-D-R-U-S-H - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Other uncommon English words near this rank
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.