drunkard

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for drunkard is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈdɹʌŋkɚd/. Corpus data places it at rank #39,790 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 is habitually drunk.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 13 documented wrong-spelling variants for drunkard, with forms such as "ddrunkard", "drnukard", and "drrunkard". 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 is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From earlier droncarde, from Middle English *druncard (attested as a surname, Druncard), possibly from Middle Low German drunkert, equivalent to drunk + -ard (“pejorative agent suffix”). Compare German Trunkart. Compare braggart. 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 drunkard, spelled D-R-U-N-K-A-R-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.