Pharaoh

How to spell pharaoh

7 letters · 2 syllables

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

pharoah pharaoh

What people typed instead

• pharoah3 people

How to pronounce pharaoh

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pharaoh mean?

1. nounA king of ancient Egypt.

Pharaoh in a sentence

• The museum exhibit traced how each pharaoh was buried with elaborate treasures.

• Archaeologists believe the tomb belonged to a young pharaoh who died unexpectedly.

Where does pharaoh come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word ultimately comes from the ancient Egyptian phrase per-aa, which literally meant 'great house' and originally referred to the royal palace itself rather than the king who lived in it. Over the centuries of Egyptian history the term shifted from naming the building to naming its royal occupant, becoming a title for the ruler. The word passed into Hebrew as par'oh, the form familiar from the biblical Exodus story, and into Greek as pharao, which is where the spelling with its awkward vowel run was fixed. From Greek it moved through Latin pharao and Old French before settling into English, where it was reshaped to pharaoh by the time of the great English Bible translations. That long journey through several languages is exactly why the ending looks so strange: the silent, vowel-heavy -aoh tail is a fossil of the Greek and Hebrew spellings, not anything English ever invented for itself.

How the word is built

• pharaoh (single root, from Egyptian per-aa 'great house'); the tricky tail is -aoh, an unusual vowel cluster preserved from the Greek and Hebrew transmission