med
/mɛːd/
"med" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“med” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #8,576) as an adjective. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #8,576
- frequency rank, English
- 4,057
- “M” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Clipping of medical.
Corpus desk
Index EN-med · med · English
med · rank #8,576 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #8,576
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,057
- PHOTO-FINISH masks
Nearest frequency peer: masks (-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 “med”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- mankind
mankind
91,428 corpus weight
- mapping
mapping
91,427 corpus weight
- masks
masks
91,426 corpus weight
- med
med
91,425 corpus weight
- metric
metric
91,424 corpus weight
- militia
militia
91,423 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “med” 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 | med |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| IPA | /mɛːd/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #8,576 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “med”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for med is neighbouring look-alikes ("my", "Mr", …), not just typos; it is anadjective pronounced /mɛːd/. Frequency #8,576 among 4,057 “M” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
med has no tracked misspelling variants, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "my", "Mr", "MS", 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, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is med, spelled M-E-D.
Definition
- 1Clipping of medical.
- 2Clipping of median
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how med appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I'm in med school.
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 "med", not the corpus desk frequency band.