forbidden

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for forbidden is 9 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /fə.ˈbɪ.dn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #7,565 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Not allowed; specifically disallowed.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for forbidden, with forms such as "fforbidden", "fobridden", and "forbbidden". 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 1 confusable-pair relationship, "forbidding", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Past participle of the verb forbid. Doublet of verboten. Compare German verboten, Dutch verboden, Swedish förbjuden, and West Frisian ferbean. 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 forbidden, spelled F-O-R-B-I-D-D-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.