machine gun
/məˈʃiːn ɡʌn/
"machine-gun" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“machine gun” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 11
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A type of fully automatic firearm that fires bullets in rapid succession by a single action of the trigger and is capable of sustained fire.
Corpus desk
Index EN-machine-gun · machine gun · English
machine gun · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 11 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "M" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | machine gun |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /məˈʃiːn ɡʌn/ |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “machine gun” in English
Rare enough to double-check
machine gun is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /məˈʃiːn ɡʌn/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A type of fully automatic firearm that fires bullets in rapid succession by a single action of the trigger and is capable of sustained fire.".
No misspelling variants are generated for machine gun in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. No confusable counterpart is on file for this word, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
No documented word history exists for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is machine gun, spelled M-A-C-H-I-N-E- -G-U-N.
Definition
- 1A type of fully automatic firearm that fires bullets in rapid succession by a single action of the trigger and is capable of sustained fire.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how machine gun appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I'm gonna get you, baby / Like a machine gun, I'm gonna… Tak-Tak-Tak-Tak-Tak
Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine. The machine gun is so much more lethal than the bow and arrow that comparisons are meaningless.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.