thick as a brick
"thick-as-a-brick" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“thick as a brick” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 16
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Very stupid; slow to learn or understand.
Corpus desk
Index EN-thick-as-a-brick · thick as a brick · English
thick as a brick · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 16 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "T" 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 | thick as a brick |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 16 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “thick as a brick” in English
Rare enough to double-check
thick as a brick is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Very stupid; slow to learn or understand.".
thick as a brick doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is thick as a brick, spelled T-H-I-C-K- -A-S- -A- -B-R-I-C-K.
Definition
- 1Very stupid; slow to learn or understand.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how thick as a brick appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
So you ride yourselves over the fields And you make all your animal deals And your wise men don't know how it feels To be thick as 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.