bitten

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for bitten is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɪt.ən/. Corpus data places it at rank #15,109 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "past participle of bite".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for bitten, with forms such as "bbitten", "biten", and "bitetn". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 17 confusable-pair relationships, "butte", "bitty", "button", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Morphologically bit + -en. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is bitten, spelled B-I-T-T-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.