broccoli

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for broccoli is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɹɒ.kə.li/. Corpus data places it at rank #14,907 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for broccoli, with forms such as "bbroccoli", "borccoli", and "brcocoli". 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 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.

Etymologically, the entry records: 1699, Italian broccoli, plural of broccolo (“cabbage sprout, head”), diminutive of brocco (“shoot, sprout”) (which is also the origin of brocade), from Latin broccus (“pointed, sharp, projecting; buck-toothed”), possibly of Gaulish origin, related to Proto-… 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 broccoli, spelled B-R-O-C-C-O-L-I, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.