l
/ɛl/
"l" is a 1-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“l” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #676) as a character. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #676
- frequency rank, English
- 2,297
- “L” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The twelfth letter of the English alphabet, called el and written in the Latin script.
Corpus desk
Index EN-l · l · English
l · rank #676 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-CORE #676
- LEN-SHORT 1 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 2,297
- PHOTO-FINISH hour
Nearest frequency peer: hour (-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 “l”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- event
event
99,328 corpus weight
- higher
higher
99,327 corpus weight
- hour
hour
99,326 corpus weight
- l
l
99,325 corpus weight
- member
member
99,324 corpus weight
- middle
middle
99,323 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “l” 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 | l |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Character |
| IPA | /ɛl/ |
| Letters | 1 |
| Frequency rank | #676 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “l”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for l is neighbouring look-alikes ("LA", "le", …), not just typos; it is acharacter pronounced /ɛl/. Frequency #676 among 2,297 “L” headwords. Gloss: "The twelfth letter of the English alphabet, called el and written in the Latin script.".
No misspelling variants are generated for l in our index, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "LA", "le", "li", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No explicit etymology string is stored 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 l, spelled L.
Definition
- 1The twelfth letter of the English alphabet, called el 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.