drunken

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for drunken is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈdɹʌŋkən/. Corpus data places it at rank #11,883 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "past participle of drink".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for drunken, with forms such as "ddrunken", "drnuken", and "drrunken". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "drunks", "drunkenly", "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 drunken, ydronken, idrunken, from Old English druncen, ġedruncen (“drunk; drunken”), from Proto-Germanic *drunkanaz (“drunken”), past participle of Proto-Germanic *drinkaną (“to drink”), equivalent to drink + -en. Cognate with West Frisi… 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 drunken, spelled D-R-U-N-K-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.