brick
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "brick", 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 "brick" 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 "brick" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
brick is aEnglishnoun. It means: A hardened rectangular block of mud, clay etc., used for building. Pronounced /bɹɪk/. It ranks #4,658 in English word frequency. Often confused with buck and Brit.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | brick |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /bɹɪk/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #4,658 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for brick is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /bɹɪk/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,658 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 15 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for brick, with forms such as "bbrick", "birck", and "brcik". 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, "buck", "Brit", "brig", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Late Middle English brik, bryke, bricke, from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch bricke ("cracked or broken brick; tile-stone"; modern Dutch brik), ultimately related to Proto-West Germanic *brekan (“to break”), whence also Old French briche and French… 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 brick, spelled B-R-I-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A hardened rectangular block of mud, clay etc., used for building.
- 2Such hardened mud, clay, etc. considered collectively, as a building material.
- 3Something shaped like a brick.
- 4The colour brick red.
- 5A helpful and reliable person.
- 6A shot which misses, particularly one which bounces directly out of the basket because of a too-flat trajectory, as if the ball were a heavier object.
- 7A power brick; an external power supply consisting of a small box with an integral male plug and an attached cord terminating in another plug.
- 8An electronic device, especially a heavy box-shaped one, that has become non-functional or obsolete.
- 9A projectile.
- 10A carton of 500 rimfire cartridges, which forms the approximate size and shape of a brick.
- 11A community card (usually the turn or the river) which does not improve a player's hand.
- 12A card in a player's hand that is currently unplayable.
- 13A kilogram of cocaine.
- 14A trans woman who does not pass.
- 15A reel or short video.
Etymology
From Late Middle English brik, bryke, bricke, from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch bricke ("cracked or broken brick; tile-stone"; modern Dutch brik), ultimately related to Proto-West Germanic *brekan (“to break”), whence also Old French briche and French brique (“brick”). Compare also German Low German Brickje (“small board, tray”). Related to break. The social media slang sense derives from memes about building up one's feed “brick by brick”, analogizing bricks with reels that inform the algorithm.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: bbrick,birck,brcik,bricck,brickk,brikc,brrick,rbick
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for brick
Misspelling Variants of "brick"
Frequency rank: #4,658 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our English index: