done

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for done is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dʌn/. Corpus data places it at rank #236 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 4 documented wrong-spelling variants for done, with forms such as "ddone", "dnoe", and "doen". 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, "due", "dot", "dye", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English don, idon, ydon, ȝedon, gedon, from Old English dōn, ġedōn, from Proto-West Germanic *dān, from Proto-Germanic *dēnaz (past participle of *dōną (“to do”)). Equivalent to do + -en (past participle ending). Cognate with Scots dune, deen, d… 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 done, spelled D-O-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.