babe
/beɪb/
"babe" is a 4-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“babe” is a regularly-used English word, ranked #5,938 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #5,938
- frequency rank, English
- 4
- letters
- 5
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - A baby or infant; a very young human or animal.
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 | babe |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /beɪb/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #5,938 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “babe” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for babe is 4 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /beɪb/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,938 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 5 likely wrong-spelling variants for babe, with forms such as "abbe", "babbe", and "baeb". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "be", "BB", "bad", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰā- Proto-Germanic *bō-redup. Proto-Germanic *babô Proto-West Germanic *babō Old English *baba Middle English babe English babe From Middle English babe, a variant of earlier baban, perhaps from Old English *baba (“boy, … The correct English form is babe, spelled B-A-B-E.
Definition
- 1A baby or infant; a very young human or animal.
- 2An attractive person, especially a young woman.
- 3Darling (term of endearment).
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰā- Proto-Germanic *bō-redup. Proto-Germanic *babô Proto-West Germanic *babō Old English *baba Middle English babe English babe From Middle English babe, a variant of earlier baban, perhaps from Old English *baba (“boy, child”), from Proto-West Germanic *babō, from Proto-Germanic *babô, reduplicated variant of *ba-, *bō- (“father, brother, close male relation”). cognates and related terms Related to Old Frisian bobba (“child”) (whence North Frisian babbe, babb, babe (“child”)), Old High German Babo (a male forename), see boy. Otherwise, origin obscure. Compare mama, dada, papa. Welsh baban (“baby”), believed by Skeat to be a mutation of maban, a diminutive of mab (“son”), is probably rather a borrowing from English. Cognate also with English bub.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: abbe,babbe,baeb,bbabe,bbae
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of babe - expressed in single-character edits (insert, delete, or swap one letter). Bigger bars stand out at a glance; a one-edit slip is the hardest to catch.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “babe”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is B-A-B-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as /beɪb/ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “be” - see the side-by-side comparison. babe vs be
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English 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.