PAH
"pah" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“PAH” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #38,539 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #38,539
- frequency rank, English
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Initialism of phenylalanine hydroxylase.
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 | PAH |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #38,539 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “PAH” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for PAH is 3 letters long, classified as a noun. Corpus data places it at rank #38,539 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Zero misspellings are on record for PAH in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "PM", "PC", "PP", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is PAH, spelled P-A-H.
Definition
- 1Initialism of phenylalanine hydroxylase.
- 2Initialism of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon.
- 3Initialism of pulmonary arterial hypertension.
- 4Initialism of paradoxical adipose hyperplasia.
This word in other languages
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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Using “PAH”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is P-A-H - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Don't mix it up with “PM” - see the side-by-side comparison. PAH vs PM
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.