membrane

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for membrane is 8 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈmɛm.bɹeɪn/. Corpus data places it at rank #9,362 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 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for membrane, with forms such as "emmbrane", "mebmrane", and "membarne". 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: Late Middle English, borrowed from Latin membrāna (“skin or membrane that covers parts of the body”), from membrum (“a limb or member of the body”) + -āna. Doublet of membrana. 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 membrane, spelled M-E-M-B-R-A-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.