CTE
"cte" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“CTE” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #33,597) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #33,597
- frequency rank, English
- 5,599
- “C” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Initialism of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Corpus desk
Index EN-cte · CTE · English
CTE · rank #33,597 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #33,597
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,599
- PHOTO-FINISH CRO
Nearest frequency peer: CRO (-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 “CTE”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- cranked
cranked
66,407 corpus weight
- crested
crested
66,406 corpus weight
- CRO
CRO
66,405 corpus weight
- CTE
CTE
66,404 corpus weight
- CTO
CTO
66,403 corpus weight
- curie
curie
66,402 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “CTE” 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 | CTE |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #33,597 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “CTE”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for CTE is neighbouring look-alikes ("CV", "CU", …), not just typos; it is anoun. Frequency #33,597 among 5,599 “C” headwords. 3 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
No misspelling variants are generated for CTE in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "CV", "CU", "CW", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
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 CTE, spelled C-T-E.
Definition
- 1Initialism of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
- 2Initialism of coefficient of thermal expansion.
- 3Initialism of common table expression.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how CTE appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
NFL players Ray Easterling, Junior Seau, Shane Dronett and Dave Duerson were found to have CTE after careers of repeated blows to the head. All died by suicide.
A recursive CTE is where an initial CTE is built and then the results from that are called recursively in a UNION statement returning subsets of data until all the data is returned. This gives you the ability to create data in a hierarchical fashion, as you will see in the next example.
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
How do you spell "CTE"?
What does "CTE" mean?
What words are commonly confused with "CTE"?
What language does "CTE" come from?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "CTE", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).