Find your version below — the details of the dream change the answer. This is a page in the teeth cluster; the homepage lists the rest. The classical sources behind every line are cited at the bottom.
One tooth broke, or several did
The checked "broken teeth" clauses in both books are written in the plural: a mouth of broken teeth, not one named tooth. Those plural lines carry the two readings above — a debt paid slowly, and sorrow from relatives. The one checked exception is a single canine or eyetooth that cracks or loses its enamel, which both books read as the death of a son. The family map of upper and lower, right and left, is the same map used on the one tooth or the whole mouth page.
The tooth broke, but it stayed in the mouth
The books do not print a separate headword for a break that stays in place. The broken-teeth clauses are about teeth that are broken, not about whether the fragment then falls. That is different from a loose tooth, which both books treat as a prior stage — illness until the tooth falls or is lost. A break is filed under its own two (or three) readings, not as a synonym for loosening.
It broke, and then it fell out
Once the tooth comes out, you also enter the falling-out ledger: debts, longevity, or — if you cannot find the tooth — death or a long absence of the person it stands for. Blood or pain shifts that ledger toward people rather than money; that is on the teeth falling out with blood page. Whether a fall is treated as a death omen still depends on conditions printed on those pages. The break itself keeps the slow-debt and kin-sorrow readings checked below; the fall adds the falling-out page, it does not erase this one. The full falling-out ledger is on the teeth falling out page.
A crown, filling, denture, or brace broke
Neither book has a separate "broken crown," "broken denture," or "broken brace" headword. The closest checked lines are these. The 1992 compilation says that if the crown or the enamel of an eyetooth is damaged, or if it falls, that is the death of one's son — "crown" there is the crown of the tooth, not a dental appliance. The same entry says that replacing a tooth with a bridge means recovering losses, or balancing one's business. Those are the lines we have; they are not a medical reading of a modern appliance that broke in the dream.
It was a chip or a crack, not a clean break
Al-Nabulsi has a specific line for a canine that splits: if he sees that his canine has cracked, his son dies. That sits next to the compilation's damaged-enamel clause for the eyetooth. A broader Nabulsi line groups blackness, a deficiency, or a break in the teeth as worry and sorrow from one's relatives — so a partial break is not left out of the kin-sorrow reading. The books do not draw a further line between a chip and a complete fracture.
Where the classical readings come from
The answers above trace to two texts: the compiled dictionary attributed to Ibn Sirin (Pearl Publishing House, 1992) and Al-Nabulsi's Arabic original, Ta'tir al-Anam. The checked passages, with page locations, are in the Sources section at the end — kept there so the first screen stays in plain English.
The Ibn Sirin compilation, in the "Tooth" entry (print p. 441, after a running head that sits mid-entry; the book-end index files "Tooth" at 440), says: if one sees his teeth broken, he pays his debts slowly. A little later in the same entry, after the next running head (print p. 442), it says that black or broken teeth mean sorrow caused by one's relatives. The damaged crown or enamel of an eyetooth, or its falling, is read as the death of one's son.
Al-Nabulsi's tooth entry, on shamela page 178 (printed page 181), prints three broken-teeth lines on one page. If he sees that his teeth have broken, a relative or a friend dies, and the line may also indicate illness and death from that illness. If he sees that his teeth have broken in pieces, he will pay his debt little by little. If he sees in his teeth blackness, a deficiency, or a break, that is worry and sorrow from his relatives. A canine that has cracked is the death of his son. The debt-slowly and kin-sorrow clauses sit in the same order as the compilation's two lines; the death-of-kin clause is printed only here, on that same page.
Zhou Gong's original-style chapter 3 ("the body, the face, teeth and hair") has two falling-teeth verdicts and no broken-tooth line. The corpus was searched for break, crack, shatter, and decay characters next to teeth; there is no such verdict. The page reports that absence rather than stretching a falling-out line to cover a broken tooth.
Two readings on the same page
The finding that sets this symbol apart is not a single verdict. Both Arabic books, on the same stretch of the tooth entry, file a broken tooth two ways at once: as a debt paid slowly, and as sorrow caused by relatives. The clauses almost mirror each other, line for line. Al-Nabulsi then prints a third line on that same page: broken teeth may mean a relative or a friend dies, or falls ill and dies of that illness. The book does not choose among the three, and this page does not collapse them.
That is also why this page is not a rewrite of the falling-out page under a new title. Falling out opens with longevity in the compilation and with household death in Al-Nabulsi — two headlines that have to be walked back with conditions. A break has its own ledger, and the death-of-kin line is one clause among others, not the title of the symbol.
Zhou Gong cannot break the tie. The chapter has no broken-tooth entry. Using "teeth fall, parents in danger" or "teeth fall and grow back, descendants thrive" as if they were broken-tooth verdicts would be inventing a line the book does not print.
What modern research adds — and what it doesn't
The one head-on study we can check is Rozen and Soffer-Dudek, Frontiers in Psychology 9:1812, 2018 (PubMed 30319507; OA full text, PMC6168631, checked for this run). The introduction names "teeth falling out, losing one's teeth, or teeth breaking or rotting" as a typical dream theme. The instrument actually used to measure "teeth dreams," though, was item 18 of Yu's Dream Motif Scale: "your teeth falling out, losing your teeth, or your teeth rotting." That item does not name breaking, chipping, or cracking. A PubMed search in this run for "broken tooth," "broken teeth," "chipped tooth," or "cracked tooth" paired with dream found no study that isolates a broken-tooth dream as its own item. If one exists, we have not found a checkable copy, and this page does not invent one.
What that 2018 paper did measure, from its Table 1 (Spearman rank-order, 1,000 bootstrapped resamples; final sample n = 210 undergraduates, 76.7% women, mean age 23.4, SD 1.43, range 18–28): teeth dreams tracked with tension or tenderness in the teeth, gums, or jaws upon awakening, r = 0.21, 95% CI [0.07, 0.33], p < 0.005. They were not associated with a direct self-report of grinding, r = 0.06, 95% CI [−0.07, 0.20], ns; nor with psychological distress, r = 0.02, 95% CI [−0.11, 0.16], ns. The authors treat the finding as preliminary and cross-sectional; they do not claim a broken-tooth dream, specifically, was the item being correlated.
The same paper cites Yu, Dreaming 22(1):18–52, 2012 (DOI 10.1037/a0026171), for prevalence: 39.0% of respondents had experienced teeth dreams at least once, 16.2% said they were recurrent, and 8.2% said they were regular. Those three figures are taken from the 2018 paper's citation of Yu, not from a fresh copy of the 2012 article in this run.
If your jaw or gums feel tight this morning, that tension finding is the closest empirical line we have. It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a verdict on a dream of a tooth that broke.
This page reports what two classical texts say, and what one checkable study measured. It is not a prediction, a medical or religious ruling, and no dream book — classical or modern — settles what a dream means for the person who had it.
Sources (all passages checked against the cited pages)
"Ifone sees his teeth broken in a dream, it means that he pays his debts slowly."
"Black or broken teeth in a dream mean sorrow caused by one's relatives."
"If the crown or the enamel of one's eyetooth is damaged, or if it falls in a dream, it means the death of one's son."
(ومن رأى) أن أسنانه انكسرت فإنه يموت أحد أقاربه أو أصدقائه وربما دلت على مرض وموت من ذلك المرض
If he sees that his teeth have broken, then one of his relatives or friends will die, and it may indicate illness and death from that illness. (Translation ours.)
وإن رأى أن أسنانه تكسرت فإنه يقضي دينه قليلاً قليلاً
And if he sees that his teeth have broken in pieces, he will pay his debt little by little. (Translation ours.)
(ومن رأى) أن في أسنانه سواداً أو نقصاناً أو كسراً فإن ذلك هم وحزن بقرابته.
If he sees in his teeth blackness, a deficiency, or a break, that is worry and sorrow from his relatives. (Translation ours.)
وإن رأى أن نابه انصدع مات ابنه
And if he sees that his canine has cracked, his son dies. (Translation ours.)
齿自落者父母凶 齿落更生子孙兴
Teeth falling out of themselves: misfortune for the parents. Teeth falling and growing again: descendants thriving. (Translation ours.)
Modern layer: Rozen & Soffer-Dudek, Frontiers in Psychology 9:1812, 2018, PubMed 30319507, OA full text (PMC6168631) checked for this run (introduction wording, item 18 wording, sample, and Table 1 coefficients above). Yu 2012 prevalence figures as cited in that paper (Dreaming 22(1):18–52, DOI 10.1037/a0026171), not from a fresh copy of Yu in this run. PubMed searches in this run for a study isolating broken, chipped, or cracked tooth dreams returned no such item.
Related questions
- Teeth falling out — the full falling-out ledger, once the tooth is gone
- Loose teeth — the move-but-not-fallen stage, which is not a break
- One tooth or the whole mouth?
- When the falling-out dream comes with blood
- Do teeth dreams mean someone will die?
- Teeth dreams and stress: what one study measured
- All teeth-dream pages, from the homepage