Balcony

How to spell balcony

7 letters · 3 syllables

35 of the 849 people asked to spell balcony in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is balconey. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

balconey balcony

What people typed instead

• balconey8 people

How to pronounce balcony

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does balcony mean?

1. nounA platform that projects from the wall of a building, enclosed by a railing and reached from an upper floor.
2. nounThe upper tier of seats in a theatre or cinema, raised above the main floor.

Balcony in a sentence

• The hotel room had a small balcony overlooking the harbour.

• Their tickets were for the front row of the balcony, high above the stage.

• She watered the herbs growing in pots on the balcony.

• The cheaper seats in the balcony still gave a clear view of the orchestra.

Where does balcony come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Balcony comes from the Italian balcone, which described a large window or a raised platform projecting from a building. That word grew out of balco, meaning 'scaffold' or 'beam', and balco itself was borrowed from a Germanic source, the Lombardic balko, simply meaning a wooden beam. English took the word up in the early 1600s, when Italian architecture and design were fashionable, and for a time the stress fell on the middle syllable (bal-CO-ny) before settling on the modern first-syllable pronunciation. Because the root is about a single beam or platform, the spelling keeps just one l and one c, which is the part writers sometimes second-guess. The same Germanic beam-word lies behind the architectural sense English never doubled, so resisting the urge to write 'ballcony' or 'balconey' is the main trap.

How the word is built

• balcon- (from Italian balcone: large window, scaffold)
• -y (anglicised noun ending)

People who misspell balcony also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got balcony wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• butte 91% of them got it wrong