Ulm
[ʊlm]
The verdict
“Ulm” is a regularly-used German word, ranked #4,742 in German word frequency and used as a proper noun.
- #4,742
- frequency rank, German
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - an der Donau gelegene Stadt in Baden-Württemberg
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 | Ulm |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| IPA | [ʊlm] |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #4,742 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “Ulm” sits in German frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The German entry for Ulm is 3 letters long, classified as a proper noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ʊlm]. Corpus data places it at rank #4,742 in overall German word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "an der Donau gelegene Stadt in Baden-Württemberg".
Ulm has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "um", "us", "up", 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 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 Ulm, spelled U-L-M.
Definition
- 1an der Donau gelegene Stadt in Baden-Württemberg
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 “Ulm”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct German spelling is U-L-M - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as [ʊlm] (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “um” - see the side-by-side comparison. Ulm vs um
- 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.