English homophones
braking/breaking
"braking" is a verb; "breaking" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "braking" arrives as a verb, while "breaking" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "br" then splits - "braking" (7 letters) vs "breaking" (8).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across braking, breaking: abgiknr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
braking
7 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVCVCC
Inventory abgiknr · no private letters vs siblings
breaking
8 letters · 3 vowels · shape CCVVCVCC
Inventory abegiknr · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "braking" when you mean: present participle and gerund of brake
- Write "breaking" when you mean: The act by which something is broken.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (braking, breaking). Here's where to go from here.
- "breaking" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,854 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 2 spellings ranks #133 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 2-spelling cluster: bad · bade. Nearby cluster
- Grammar often disambiguates this cluster, match the meaning to the part of speech before picking a spelling. Pick by meaning
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.