wog
/wɒɡ/
"wog" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“wog” is an uncommon English word, ranked #86,956 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #86,956
- frequency rank, English
- 3
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A non-white person, originally specifically an Indian. (In later use, more loosely used of various non-white peoples. Now dated and sometimes conflated with gollywog.)
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | wog |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /wɒɡ/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #86,956 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “wog” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for wog is 3 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /wɒɡ/. Corpus data places it at rank #86,956 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for wog, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
Etymologically, the entry records: The origins are not entirely clear. The term was first noted by the lexicographer F.C. Bowen in 1929, in his Sea Slang: a dictionary of the old-timers’ expressions and epithets, where he defines wogs as "lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast.… The correct English form is wog, spelled W-O-G.
Definition
- 1A non-white person, originally specifically an Indian. (In later use, more loosely used of various non-white peoples. Now dated and sometimes conflated with gollywog.)
- 2Someone of Mediterranean descent, such as an Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Lebanese, Greek, or Maltese person.
- 3A person who is not a Scientologist.
Etymology
The origins are not entirely clear. The term was first noted by the lexicographer F.C. Bowen in 1929, in his Sea Slang: a dictionary of the old-timers’ expressions and epithets, where he defines wogs as "lower class Babu shipping clerks on the Indian coast." The most common theory is that it is a clipping of golliwog, which was first used as the name of a black-faced doll in Florence Upton’s 1895 book The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg. A variety of folk etymologies exist, with the most common claiming that the word is an acronym for one of either westernized, worthy, wily, or wonderful preceding “Oriental gentlemen”. Another erroneous claim is that it was used in the mid 1800s, with WOGS (meaning Working On Government Service) stencilled on the shirts of Indian workers in Egypt. The Scientologist sense is from the usage of L. Ron Hubbard, who apparently accepted the folk etymology from “worthy Oriental gentleman” but employed the term to mean “common ordinary run-of-the-mill garden-variety humanoid”.
This word in other languages
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 “wog”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is W-O-G - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /wɒɡ/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
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.