GAU
Letters
3 characters
Frequency Rank
#17,582
in German word usage
Misspellings
0
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
GAU is anGermanabbrev. It means: Größter Anzunehmender Unfall: schwerwiegendster Störfall eines Kernkraftwerks, für den es konstruktiv vorbereitet sein muss, den es also noch verkraften kann ohne dass es zu relevanten Freisetzunge... Pronounced [ɡaʊ̯]. Often confused with go and ge.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | GAU |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Abbrev |
| IPA | [ɡaʊ̯] |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #17,582 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The German entry for GAU is 3 letters long, classified as anabbrev, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ɡaʊ̯]. Corpus data places it at rank #17,582 in overall German word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for GAU in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable German patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "go", "ge", "GG", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct German form is GAU, spelled G-A-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Größter Anzunehmender Unfall: schwerwiegendster Störfall eines Kernkraftwerks, für den es konstruktiv vorbereitet sein muss, den es also noch verkraften kann ohne dass es zu relevanten Freisetzungen von Radioaktivität kommt (dieses historische Konzept ist heute ersetzt durch die Auslegungsstörfälle im Konzept der gestaffelten Sicherheit)
- 2besonders schlimme Entwicklung, besonders schlimmer Zustand in beliebigen Bereichen
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #17,582 in German
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Nearby German words
Other entries that begin with the letter G in our German index: