shit a brick
"shit-a-brick" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“shit a brick” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 12
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To react strongly or excessively, especially in anger, fear, or astonishment.
Corpus desk
Index EN-shit-a-brick · shit a brick · English
shit a brick · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 12 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" 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 | shit a brick |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “shit a brick” in English
Rare enough to double-check
shit a brick is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To react strongly or excessively, especially in anger, fear, or astonishment.".
Zero misspellings are on record for shit a brick in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is shit a brick, spelled S-H-I-T- -A- -B-R-I-C-K.
Definition
- 1To react strongly or excessively, especially in anger, fear, or astonishment.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how shit a brick appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
If our boss finds out we did this and didn't tell him, he's gonna shit a brick.
When he saw that bull moose charging, he was about to shit a brick.
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.