bps
"bps" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“bps” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #37,351) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #37,351
- frequency rank, English
- 4,121
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Initialism of bit per second, a measure of speed of digital communication.
Corpus desk
Index EN-bps · bps · English
bps · rank #37,351 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #37,351
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,121
- PHOTO-FINISH boyish
Nearest frequency peer: boyish (-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 “bps”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- bonsai
bonsai
62,654 corpus weight
- Boro
Boro
62,653 corpus weight
- Bosworth
Bosworth
62,652 corpus weight
- boyish
boyish
62,651 corpus weight
- bps
bps
62,650 corpus weight
- Brownlow
Brownlow
62,646 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “bps” 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 | bps |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #37,351 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “bps”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for bps is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "BS", …), not just typos; it is anoun. Frequency #37,351 among 4,121 “B” headwords. 3 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
bps 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, "by", "BS", "br", 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 any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is bps, spelled B-P-S.
Definition
- 1Initialism of bit per second, a measure of speed of digital communication.
- 2baud rate
- 3Initialism of basis point, ‱.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how bps appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
In most digital systems using binary code, 1 Baud = 1 bps. https://newhavendisplay.com/blog/baud-rate/#difference
The RBI this month raised rates by 50 basis points after a 40 bps hike in May.
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 "bps", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).