drone
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
5 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "drone", 5-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "drone" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "drone" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
drone is aEnglishnoun. It means: A male ant, bee, or wasp, which does not work but can fertilize the queen. Pronounced /dɹəʊn/. It ranks #7,127 in English word frequency. Often confused with drop and dune.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | drone |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /dɹəʊn/ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #7,127 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for drone is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɹəʊn/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,127 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for drone, with forms such as "ddrone", "dorne", and "drnoe". 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, "drop", "dune", "drunk", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English drane, from Old English drān, from Proto-West Germanic *drānu, from Proto-Germanic *drēniz, *drēnuz, *drenô (“an insect, drone”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰreh₁n- (“bee, drone, hornet”). Cognate with Danish drone (“drone”), Dutch dar (… 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 drone, spelled D-R-O-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A male ant, bee, or wasp, which does not work but can fertilize the queen.
- 2One who does not work; a lazy person, an idler.
- 3One who performs menial or tedious work.
- 4A remotely operated vehicle.
- 5A remotely operated vehicle.
- 6A Toyota HiAce or a similar van, especially one used by Ugandan state agents to kidnap opposition members.
- 7One who lacks the ability to think critically and independently, especially one who follows a group blindly; a non-player character.
- 8In dronification kink, one who is mindless and obedient to a dominant, characterized by a detached and robotic identity and an anonymous appearance, typically composed of a latex suit and gas mask.
Etymology
From Middle English drane, from Old English drān, from Proto-West Germanic *drānu, from Proto-Germanic *drēniz, *drēnuz, *drenô (“an insect, drone”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰreh₁n- (“bee, drone, hornet”). Cognate with Danish drone (“drone”), Dutch dar (“male bee or wasp”), German Drohne, dialectal German Dräne, Trehne, Trene (“drone”), Low German drone (“drone”), Swedish drönje, drönare (“drone”). The etymology of the sense of "remote-controlled aircraft" is disputed; theories include early military UAVs dumbly flying on preset paths.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ddrone,dorne,drnoe,droen,dronne,drrone,rdone
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for drone
Misspelling Variants of "drone"
Frequency rank: #7,127 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our English index: