whiten
/ˈ(h)waɪ̯.tən/
"whiten" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“whiten” is an uncommon English word, ranked #59,122 in English word frequency and used as a verb.
- #59,122
- frequency rank, English
- 6
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - (To cause) to become white or whiter; to bleach or blanch.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | whiten |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ˈ(h)waɪ̯.tən/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #59,122 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “whiten” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for whiten is 6 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈ(h)waɪ̯.tən/. Corpus data places it at rank #59,122 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.
whiten doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English whitenen, whitnen, from Old Norse hvítna (“to whiten”), from Proto-Germanic *hwītnōną (“to whiten, become white”), from Proto-Indo-European *kwind-, *kwint- (“bright”), equivalent to white + -en. Cognate with Icelandic hvítna (“to whiten… The correct English form is whiten, spelled W-H-I-T-E-N.
Definition
- 1(To cause) to become white or whiter; to bleach or blanch.
- 2To increase the security of an iterated block cipher by steps that combine the data with portions of the key.
- 3To normalize data so that the covariance matrix becomes the identity matrix; i.e., to remove correlations so each variable has unit variance.
Etymology
From Middle English whitenen, whitnen, from Old Norse hvítna (“to whiten”), from Proto-Germanic *hwītnōną (“to whiten, become white”), from Proto-Indo-European *kwind-, *kwint- (“bright”), equivalent to white + -en. Cognate with Icelandic hvítna (“to whiten”), Swedish vitna, hvitna (“to whiten”), Danish hvidne (“to whiten”). Compare Old English hwītian (“to whiten, become white, be white, make white”).
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); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “whiten”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is W-H-I-T-E-N - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /ˈ(h)waɪ̯.tən/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.