BOM
/bɑm/
"bom" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“BOM” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #18,504) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #18,504
- frequency rank, English
- 4,121
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Acronym of bill of materials.
Corpus desk
Index EN-bom · BOM · English
BOM · rank #18,504 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #18,504
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,121
- PHOTO-FINISH bog
Nearest frequency peer: bog (-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 “BOM”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- blooded
blooded
81,500 corpus weight
- blossoms
blossoms
81,499 corpus weight
- bog
bog
81,498 corpus weight
- BOM
BOM
81,497 corpus weight
- bombardment
bombardment
81,496 corpus weight
- borderline
borderline
81,495 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “BOM” 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 | BOM |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /bɑm/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #18,504 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “BOM”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for BOM is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "BS", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced /bɑm/. Frequency #18,504 among 4,121 “B” headwords. 4 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
No generated misspelling entries exist for BOM in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "by", "BS", "br", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is BOM, spelled B-O-M.
Definition
- 1Acronym of bill of materials.
- 2Acronym of byte order mark.
- 3Acronym of business-office must (“a story that must be published at the behest of the publication's business office”).
- 4Initialism of Book of Mormon.
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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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "BOM", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).