drunk

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for drunk is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɹʌŋk/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,439 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 4 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 drunk, with forms such as "ddrunk", "drnuk", and "drrunk". 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, "dun", "duck", "Dunn", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English drunke, drunken, ydrunke, ydrunken, from Old English druncen, ġedruncen (“drunk”), from Proto-Germanic *drunkanaz, *gadrunkanaz (“drunk; drunken”), past participle of Proto-Germanic *drinkaną (“to drink”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian … 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 drunk, spelled D-R-U-N-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.