put the brakes on
"put-the-brakes-on" is a 14-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“put the brakes on” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 17
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To stop (an event, action, or process) or to slow it down.
Corpus desk
Index EN-put-the-brakes-on · put the brakes on · English
put the brakes on · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 17 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "P" 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 | put the brakes on |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 17 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “put the brakes on” in English
Rare enough to double-check
put the brakes on is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
No misspelling variants are generated for put the brakes on in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. No confusable counterpart is on file for this word, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology 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 put the brakes on, spelled P-U-T- -T-H-E- -B-R-A-K-E-S- -O-N.
Definition
- 1To stop (an event, action, or process) or to slow it down.
- 2To cease to perform one's current activity or to decrease one's level of activity.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how put the brakes on appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
"[T]he fight I saw that day made the others look like a young ladies' quadrille. . . . [Y]ou could no more separate them two than you could put the brakes on a blame earthquake."
Having put the brakes on credit expansion by raising interest rates, Humphrey last week decided the time had come to step on the gas.
Synonyms
Antonyms
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.