Spelling
Unkown or unknown?
Unknown is the right spelling. Unkown is a common misspelling of it.
UNKOWN leaves out the N after NK.
Why people write UNKOWN
Some letters are barely said, or not said at all, in everyday speech (the N in government, the P in pumpkin), so they drop out when the word is written as it sounds.
Un + known: keep the K and W of known.
How often UNKNOWN is misspelled
In the web pages Google counted for its trillion-word corpus (Peter Norvig's word counts), UNKOWN appears 3 times for every 1,000 UNKNOWN, about once for every 333 correct uses.
Is UNKOWN a word?
No. UNKOWN is not in NWL2023, Collins Scrabble Words or ENABLE, the word lists Scrabble and other word games use, so no word game accepts it. UNKNOWN is in all three and scores 14 points in Scrabble before bonus squares.
What unknown means
adjective: Not known.
For example: "an unknown amount"
More words with the same mistake
A letter left out:
More spelling help
Commonly misspelled words, grouped by the mistake · Free printables and word games for teachers · Unscramble any letters