stolen

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for stolen is 6 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈstəʊ.ln̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #3,586 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "past participle of steal".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for stolen, with forms such as "sotlen", "sstolen", and "stloen". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "style", "store", "stone", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English stolen, istolen, from Old English stolen, ġestolen, from Proto-Germanic *stulanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic *stelaną (“to steal”), equivalent to stole + -en. Cognate with Scots stellin, stollin (“stolen”), Saterland Frisian stää… 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 stolen, spelled S-T-O-L-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.