NBA
[ɛnbiˈʔɛɪ̯]
The verdict
“NBA” is a moderately-common German word, ranked #11,103 in German word frequency and used as a noun.
- #11,103
- frequency rank, German
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - nordamerikanische Basketball-Profiliga; die mit großem Abstand stärkste und populärste Basketball-Liga der Welt
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 | NBA |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | [ɛnbiˈʔɛɪ̯] |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #11,103 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “NBA” sits in German frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The German entry for NBA is 3 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ɛnbiˈʔɛɪ̯]. Corpus data places it at rank #11,103 in overall German word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "nordamerikanische Basketball-Profiliga; die mit großem Abstand stärkste und populärste Basketball-Liga der Welt".
NBA doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Ne", "NS", "Nd", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct German form is NBA, spelled N-B-A.
Definition
- 1nordamerikanische Basketball-Profiliga; die mit großem Abstand stärkste und populärste Basketball-Liga der Welt
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 “NBA”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct German spelling is N-B-A - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as [ɛnbiˈʔɛɪ̯] (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “Ne” - see the side-by-side comparison. NBA vs Ne
- 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.