brittle

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for brittle is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɹɪtl̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #20,054 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for brittle, with forms such as "bbrittle", "birttle", and "britle". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "Britt", "battle", "bottle", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English britel, brutel, brotel (“brittle”), from Old English *brytel, *bryttol (“brittle, fragile”, literally “prone to or tending to break”); equivalent to brit + -le. 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 brittle, spelled B-R-I-T-T-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.