drown

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for drown is 5 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɹaʊn/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,534 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for drown, with forms such as "ddrown", "dorwn", and "dronw". 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, "drowns", "drowsy", "drowned", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English drownen, drounen, drunen (“to drown”), of obscure and uncertain origin. The OED suggests an unattested Old English form *drūnian. Harper 2001 points to Old English druncnian, ġedruncnian (> Middle English drunknen, dronknen (“to drown”))… 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 drown, spelled D-R-O-W-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.