PBA
"pba" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“PBA” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #48,404) as a proper noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #48,404
- frequency rank, English
- 4,417
- “P” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Initialism of Professional Bowlers Association.
Corpus desk
Index EN-pba · PBA · English
PBA · rank #48,404 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #48,404
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,417
- PHOTO-FINISH parallelism
Nearest frequency peer: parallelism (-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 “PBA”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- pageantry
pageantry
51,599 corpus weight
- parallelism
parallelism
51,598 corpus weight
- PBA
PBA
51,597 corpus weight
- peasy
peasy
51,596 corpus weight
- penitent
penitent
51,594 corpus weight
- pentagram
pentagram
51,593 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “PBA” 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 | PBA |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #48,404 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “PBA”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for PBA is neighbouring look-alikes ("PM", "PC", …), not just typos; it is aproper noun. Frequency #48,404 among 4,417 “P” headwords. 4 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
No misspelling variants are generated for PBA in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "PM", "PC", "PP", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct English form is PBA, spelled P-B-A.
Definition
- 1Initialism of Professional Bowlers Association.
- 2Initialism of Philippine Basketball Association.
- 3Initialism of Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.
- 4Initialism of Prevent Blindness America.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how PBA appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
“The very first game I bowled as a member of the USBC, I shot 300 and they gave me a $100 bill,” Pete says. “It was like, oh wow, so I can make money here. I knew exactly then that I wanted to be a professional bowler.” He joined the PBA Tour at 17 years old, competing alongside his father, and he won Rookie of the Year honors in 1980.
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 "PBA", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).