broken

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for broken is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɹəʊ.kn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,387 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "past participle of break".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for broken, with forms such as "bbroken", "borken", and "brkoen". 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 19 confusable-pair relationships, "brown", "broker", "Brooke", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English broken, from Old English brocen, ġebrocen, from Proto-Germanic *brukanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic *brekaną (“to break”). Cognate with Dutch gebroken (“broken”), German Low German broken (“broken”), German gebrochen (“broken”). … 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 broken, spelled B-R-O-K-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.