burglar

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for burglar is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈbɜːɡlə(ɹ)/. Corpus data places it at rank #18,510 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A person who breaks in to premises with the intent of committing theft.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for burglar, with forms such as "bburglar", "bruglar", and "bugrlar". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "burlap", "burglary", "burger", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: 16th century, from Medieval Latin burglātor, British byform of burgātor (“burglar”), derived from burgō (“to commit burglary”), from Late Latin burgus (“fortified town”), itself probably from Frankish *burg (“fortress”), from Proto-Germanic *burgz, *burgiją… 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 burglar, spelled B-U-R-G-L-A-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.