Dutchman

How to spell dutchman

8 letters · 2 syllables

16 of the 42 people asked to spell dutchman in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is dutchmen. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

dutchmen dutchman

What people typed instead

• dutchmen8 people

How to pronounce dutchman

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dutchman mean?

1. nounA man who is a native or inhabitant of the Netherlands.

Dutchman in a sentence

• The tall dutchman explained that he had grown up near Amsterdam.

• Every dutchman at the conference spoke fluent English alongside his native tongue.

Where does dutchman come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word joins two Germanic elements: 'Dutch' and 'man'. The 'Dutch' part traces back through Middle Dutch 'dutsch' to the Proto-Germanic root *theudiskaz, meaning roughly 'of the people' or 'belonging to the nation', built on *theudo 'people'; the very same root gave German speakers their own name for their language, 'Deutsch'. Centuries ago English used 'Dutch' loosely for Germanic peoples in general, but by the 1600s, as trade and rivalry with the Low Countries grew, the sense narrowed to the inhabitants of the Netherlands. The 'man' element is simply the ordinary Old English 'mann', meaning a person. The carpentry and stagecraft sense, a small piece inserted to hide a flaw or fill a gap, grew out of trade slang. The spelling keeps the 'tch' cluster of 'Dutch', which is the main thing to watch when writing it.

How the word is built

• dutch (of the Netherlands, from Proto-Germanic *theudisk 'of the people')
• man (Old English mann 'person')

People who misspell dutchman also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got dutchman wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• laundering 100% of them got it wrong