How many letters is the answer to "burden"?

Anything from 4 to 11. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.

How reliable are these answers?

15 of the 23 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.

Crossword clue

Burden crossword clue

23 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "burden", from as short as 4 letters up to 11, grouped below by the length of your slot.

Written by Blake Boege

Answers by length

Read the row that matches your slot. CORE is the shortest answer here and ENCUMBRANCE the longest.

Letters	Answers
4	core gistconfirmed by two sources loadconfirmed by two sources onusconfirmed by two sources pill
5	plumb
6	chargeconfirmed by two sources effect saddleconfirmed by two sources weightconfirmed by two sources adjure deluge fardel
7	burthenconfirmed by two sources essenceconfirmed by two sources loadingconfirmed by two sources
8	overloadconfirmed by two sources
9	millstoneconfirmed by two sources overwhelm
10	deadweightconfirmed by two sources impositionconfirmed by two sources overburdenconfirmed by two sources
11	encumbranceconfirmed by two sources

What this list looks like

Length 6 carries 7 answers, the largest group on this page.

At 4 letters you have CORE and GIST and LOAD and ONUS and PILL, and short answers like these turn up far more often than their share of the dictionary suggests.

11 of the 23 are not synonyms at all but specific kinds of what the clue describes.

Which one does the setter mean?

Four squares is ONUS, which is the answer to this clue more often than all the other four-letter candidates together. It means the burden of responsibility specifically, as in onus of proof, and setters love it.

How these differ

Three senses live in this list. The weight carried: LOAD, WEIGHT, DEADWEIGHT and OVERLOAD. The responsibility: ONUS, CHARGE and IMPOSITION, where a burden is a duty rather than an object. And a third that catches people out: CORE, GIST, ESSENCE and BURTHEN, because the burden of a song or an argument is its main theme, from an entirely separate root meaning a refrain. MILLSTONE and FARDEL are figurative, the fardel being Hamlet's bundle. SADDLE is the verb: to saddle someone with something.

Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have

Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.

Where these answers come from

Computed, not copied. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “burden” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 15 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.

Common questions

What is the answer to the crossword clue "burden"?: There is more than one. 23 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Four squares is ONUS, which is the answer to this clue more often than all the other four-letter candidates together. It means the burden of responsibility specifically, as in onus of proof, and setters love it.
How many letters is the answer to "burden"?: Anything from 4 to 11. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
How reliable are these answers?: 15 of the 23 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.