Final

I have a book in front of me that claims that there are only twenty words in the English language ending in the letter 'U'. What are

MWCD10 reports: 593 entries found for *u, of which 310 are in list.

[list omitted]

You sort them out. Some are proper names and others are two-word terms, but here must be more than twenty that fit your question.

Even egrep '$[a-z]u^' /usr/dict/words finds more than that. I'm sure a more complete dictionary would have way more than 20.

If you got rid of all the English words not taken from Old English, not much would be left.

Anyway, flu is from Italian, caribou is from Algonquian, tofu is from Japanese, guru is from Hindi, gnu is from Bushman, coypu is from Araucanian, but they're all English words now

How much?

Well, all the words here, at least.

I was thinking within our topic: Words ending in 'u'.

So what words might we surmise that the OP was after, i.e. the 20 words in English that end with a 'u'. I've put my list of 20 in order, from 1 being certain to 20 being dubious.

1. you 2. thou 3. plateau 4. menu 5. bureau 6. lieu 7. miaou 8. impromptu 9. gnu 10. emu 11. flu 12. portmanteau 13. guru 14. bijou 15. sou 16. lulu 17. tutu 18. marabou 19. tableau 20. plateau

Words I left out include caribou, coypu, haiku, jujitsu, landau, mu, nu, nehru, nylgau, sadhu, snafu, tiramisu, tofu, uhuru and virtu.

It seems that I when I think of English words I tend to include words of French origin as more likely candidates than words that have evolved farther afield.

Any comments?

No, not 'how much' but 'not much'. According to David, those two words are all you get to keep.

The word 'plateau' appears on the list twice.

$ grep -i u$ /usr/dict/words wc -l

gave me 62 hits.

Where may one connect to that?