swollen

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for swollen is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈswəʊ.lən/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,622 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Protuberant or abnormally distended (as by injury or disease).".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for swollen, with forms such as "sowllen", "sswollen", and "swlolen". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "stolen", "sullen", "swelled", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English swollen, i-swolle, y-swolle, yswolle, ȝeswollen, from Old English swollen, ġeswollen, from Proto-Germanic *swullanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic *swellaną (“to swell”). Cognate with West Frisian swollen (“swollen”), Dutch gezwolle… 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 swollen, spelled S-W-O-L-L-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.