Gay
[ɡɛɪ̯]
The verdict
“Gay” is a regularly-used German word, ranked #9,369 in German word frequency and used as a noun.
- #9,369
- frequency rank, German
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Mann mit sexueller Neigung zu Männern
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 | Gay |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | [ɡɛɪ̯] |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #9,369 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “Gay” sits in German frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The German entry for Gay is 3 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ɡɛɪ̯]. Corpus data places it at rank #9,369 in overall German word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Mann mit sexueller Neigung zu Männern".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for Gay, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "go", "ge", "GG", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct German form is Gay, spelled G-A-Y.
Definition
- 1Mann mit sexueller Neigung zu Männern
Synonyms
Antonyms
This word in other languages
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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Using “Gay”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct German spelling is G-A-Y - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as [ɡɛɪ̯] (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “go” - see the side-by-side comparison. Gay vs go
- Browse more German words and confusable pairs in the same reference. German words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.