Broke

How to spell broke

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce broke

What does broke mean?

1. verbThe past tense of break: to have separated something into pieces, or to have failed to keep a rule or promise.
2. adjectiveHaving no money available; financially ruined or temporarily without funds.

Broke in a sentence

• verb

  The delivery driver broke two plates while unloading the boxes.

• adjective

  After paying the rent and the car repair, she was completely broke until payday.

• verb

  He broke his promise to repay the money by Friday.

• adjective

  The startup went broke within a year of launching.

Where does broke come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is the old past tense of 'break', which descends from the Old English verb 'brecan', meaning 'to shatter, divide, or violate'. That verb belonged to a strong Germanic family, where the past tense was formed by changing the inner vowel rather than adding an ending, which is why we still say 'broke' instead of 'breaked'. The same root surfaces in related words like 'breach' and 'fragment', the latter coming from the Latin cousin 'frangere', 'to break', which shares a distant ancestor. The financial sense, describing a person who has 'broken' their funds and has no money left, grew up in English from the 1700s, building on the idea of something being smashed or exhausted. The spelling keeps the silent final 'e' that signals the long vowel, and the 'o' here represents that classic strong-verb vowel shift from the 'ea' of 'break'.

How the word is built

• brok- (past stem of Old English brecan, to break)
• -e