b
/b/
"b" is a 1-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“b” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #440) as a character. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #440
- frequency rank, English
- 4,121
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The second letter of the English alphabet, called bee and written in the Latin script.
Corpus desk
Index EN-b · b · English
b · rank #440 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-CORE #440
- LEN-SHORT 1 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,121
- PHOTO-FINISH wanted
Nearest frequency peer: wanted (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
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.
Frequency neighbours of confusable “b”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- past
past
99,564 corpus weight
- possible
possible
99,563 corpus weight
- wanted
wanted
99,562 corpus weight
- b
b
99,561 corpus weight
- cause
cause
99,560 corpus weight
- due
due
99,559 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “b” against nearest ranked English headwords, not a reprint of the confusable-pair desk.
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 | b |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Character |
| IPA | /b/ |
| Letters | 1 |
| Frequency rank | #440 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “b”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for b is neighbouring look-alikes ("be", "by", …), not just typos; it is acharacter pronounced /b/. Frequency #440 among 4,121 “B” headwords. Gloss: "The second letter of the English alphabet, called bee and written in the Latin script.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for b, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "be", "by", "BC", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so its spelling is easiest explained by how it's pronounced rather than where it came from. The correct English form is b, spelled B.
Definition
- 1The second letter of the English alphabet, called bee and written in the Latin script.
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 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.