rue
[ruː]
The verdict
“rue” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #16,534) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #16,534
- frequency rank, German
- 2,984
- “R” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Reue
Corpus desk
Index DE-rue · rue · German
rue · rank #16,534 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #16,534
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 2,984
- PHOTO-FINISH Ruine
Nearest frequency peer: Ruine (+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 „rue“
Peers mit ähnlichem Corpus-Gewicht, getrennt von den Verwechslungspaaren unten
- Rivalen
Rivalen
83,470 corpus weight
- rolling
rolling
83,469 corpus weight
- rue
rue
83,467 corpus weight
- Ruine
Ruine
83,466 corpus weight
- Salomon
Salomon
83,465 corpus weight
- Sanitäter
Sanitäter
83,464 corpus weight
What this shows Balken platzieren „rue“ 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 | rue |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | [ruː] |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #16,534 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus-Rang neben Verwechslern von „rue“
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for rue is neighbouring look-alikes ("RV", "RZ", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced [ruː]. Frequency #16,534 among 2,984 “R” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for rue, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "RV", "RZ", "Rum", 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 its spelling is easiest explained by how it's pronounced rather than where it came from. The correct German form is rue, spelled R-U-E.
Definition
- 1Reue
- 2Mitgefühl, Mitleid
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how rue appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
"With rue my heart is laden
"Till every eye that saw her grew
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 "rue", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked German headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).