bread
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "bread", 5-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "bread" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "bread" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
bread is aEnglishnoun. It means: A foodstuff made by baking dough made from cereals. Pronounced /brɛd/. It ranks #2,981 in English word frequency. Often confused with bred and brew.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | bread |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /brɛd/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #2,981 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for bread is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /brɛd/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,981 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for bread, with forms such as "bbread", "berad", and "braed". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "bred", "brew", "bree", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰrewh₁-der.? Proto-Germanic *braudą Proto-West Germanic *braud Old English brēad Middle English bred English bread From Middle English bred, breed, from Old English brēad (“fragment, bit, morsel, crumb", also "bread”), f… 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 bread, spelled B-R-E-A-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A foodstuff made by baking dough made from cereals.
- 2A foodstuff made by baking dough made from cereals.
- 3Food; sustenance; support of life, in general.
- 4Any variety of bread.
- 5Money.
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰrewh₁-der.? Proto-Germanic *braudą Proto-West Germanic *braud Old English brēad Middle English bred English bread From Middle English bred, breed, from Old English brēad (“fragment, bit, morsel, crumb", also "bread”), from Proto-West Germanic *braud, from Proto-Germanic *braudą (“bread”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰerw-, *bʰrewh₁- (“to boil; to brew”), from *bʰer- (“to bear, carry”). Alternatively, from Proto-Germanic *braudaz, *brauþaz (“broken piece, fragment”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰera- (“to split, beat, hew, struggle”) (see brittle). Perhaps a conflation of the two. Possibly a doublet of broa. Cognates Cognate with Scots breid (“bread”), Yola breed (“bread”), North Frisian bruad, Bruar, brüüdj (“bread”), Saterland Frisian Brood (“bread”), West Frisian brea (“bread”), Alemannic German brot, broud, bruat, bròt, bröt (“bread”), Cimbrian proat, pròat (“bread”), Dutch brood (“bread”), German Brod, Brot (“bread”), German Low German Brod, Brood, Broot, Brot, Bräot (“bread”), Limburgish broed (“bread”), Luxembourgish Brout (“bread”), Mòcheno proat (“bread”), Vilamovian brūt (“bread; loaf”), Yiddish ברויט (broyt, “bread”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål brød (“bread”), Elfdalian broð (“bread”), Faroese breyð (“bread”), Icelandic brauð (“bread”), Norn brau, brow (“bread”), Norwegian Nynorsk braud, brød (“bread”), Swedish bröd (“bread”), Crimean Gothic broe (“bread”); also Cornish brys (“thought; mind”), Irish and Scottish Gaelic beir (“bear, give birth to”), Welsh bryd (“aim, intent”), Latin fors (“chance, luck”), Greek φέρνω (férno), φέρω (féro, “to bear, carry”), Albanian brydh (“to ripen, soften; to crumble”), Latvian bērt (“to pour; to scatter, strew”), Lithuanian berti (“to scatter, strew”), Belarusian бру́ха (brúxa, “belly”), Czech břich, břicho, břuch (“belly”), Kashubian brzëch (“belly”), Polish brzuch, brzucho (“belly”), Russian брю́хо (brjúxo, “belly”), Slovak brucho (“belly”), Armenian բերել (berel, “to bring, fetch”), Persian بردن (bordan/burdan, “to bear, carry”), Tocharian A and Tocharian B pär- (“to bear; to wear”), Sanskrit भारयति (bhārayati, “to carry”). Eclipsed non-native Middle English payn (“bread”), borrowed from Old French pain (“bread”). In this sense, mostly replaced loaf, which had been the more common term in Old English (see hlaf), a process which similarly occured in other languages such as German.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: bbread,berad,braed,breadd,breda,brread,rbead
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for bread
Misspelling Variants of "bread"
Frequency rank: #2,981 in English
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our English index: