break-down
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
10 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "break-down", 10-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 "break-down" 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 "break-down" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
break down is aEnglishverb. It means: To stop functioning.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | break down |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for break down is 10 letters long, classified as averb. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for break down in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is break down, spelled B-R-E-A-K- -D-O-W-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To stop functioning.
- 2To unexpectedly collapse, physically or in structure.
- 3To intentionally demolish; to pull down.
- 4To fail, especially socially or for political reasons.
- 5To give in or give up: relent, concede, surrender.
- 6To render or to become unstable due to stress, to collapse physically or mentally.
- 7To render or to become weak and ineffective.
- 8To (cause to) decay, to decompose.
- 9To separate into a number of parts.
- 10To divide into parts to give more details, to provide a more indepth analysis of.
- 11To digest.
- 12Bust down or bust a move; the act of performing energetic, often freestyle or hip-hop moves, frequently during a song’s instrumental break where only drums or bass are playing.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our English index: