buy
[baɪ]
The verdict
“buy” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #16,659) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #16,659
- frequency rank, German
- 5,818
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Handlung, mit der etwas gegen Hingabe von Geld erworben wird: Kauf
Corpus desk
Index DE-buy · buy · German
buy · rank #16,659 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #16,659
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,818
- PHOTO-FINISH Bürgermeister…
Nearest frequency peer: Bürgermeisterin (+1 rank slots)
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Häufigkeitsnachbarn des Verwechslers „buy“
Peers mit ähnlichem Corpus-Gewicht, getrennt von den Verwechslungspaaren unten
- Bundesminis…
Bundesminister
83,345 corpus weight
- buntes
buntes
83,344 corpus weight
- buy
buy
83,342 corpus weight
- Bürgermeist…
Bürgermeisterin
83,341 corpus weight
- Cafés
Cafés
83,340 corpus weight
- Campingplatz
Campingplatz
83,339 corpus weight
What this shows Balken platzieren „buy“ gegen die nächsten gerankten deutschen Lemmata, kein Reprint der Verwechslungsdesk.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | buy |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | [baɪ] |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #16,659 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus-Rang neben Verwechslern von „buy“
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for buy is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "BVB", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced [baɪ]. Frequency #16,659 among 5,818 “B” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
buy has no tracked misspelling variants, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "by", "BVB", "bye", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct German form is buy, spelled B-U-Y.
Definition
- 1Handlung, mit der etwas gegen Hingabe von Geld erworben wird: Kauf
- 2die Sache, die erworben wird: Kauf
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how buy appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The bag was a good buy.
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 German corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar German words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "buy", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked German headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).