unbroken

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for unbroken is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʌnˈbɹoʊkn̩/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,968 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for unbroken, with forms such as "nubroken", "ubnroken", and "unbbroken". 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 2 confusable-pair relationships, "unspoken", "unproven", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English unbroken, from Old English unġebrocen (“unbroken”), equivalent to un- + broken. Cognate with Dutch ongebroken (“unbroken”), German Low German unbroken (“unbroken”), German ungebrochen (“unbroken”). 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 unbroken, spelled U-N-B-R-O-K-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.