taken

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for taken is 5 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈteɪ.kn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #474 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for taken, with forms such as "atken", "taekn", and "takenn". 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, "ten", "tan", "then", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English taken, takenn, from Old English tacen, *ġetacen, from Old Norse tekinn, from Proto-Germanic *tēkanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic *tēkaną (“to take; grasp; touch”). Cognate with Scots takin, tane, Danish tagen, Swedish tagen, Icela… 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 taken, spelled T-A-K-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.