UAV
"uav" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“UAV” is a moderately-common English word, ranked #31,809 in English word frequency and used as a noun.
- #31,809
- frequency rank, English
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Initialism of unmanned aerial vehicle or uncrewed aerial vehicle: an aircraft with no onboard pilot, and sometimes completely unpiloted, that is capable of controlled, sustained, level flight.
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 | UAV |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #31,809 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “UAV” sits in English frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for UAV is 3 letters long, classified as a noun. Corpus data places it at rank #31,809 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Initialism of unmanned aerial vehicle or uncrewed aerial vehicle: an aircraft with no onboard pilot, and sometimes completely unpiloted, that is capable of controlled, sustained, level flight.".
Zero misspellings are on record for UAV in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "up", "us", "UK", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct English form is UAV, spelled U-A-V.
Definition
- 1Initialism of unmanned aerial vehicle or uncrewed aerial vehicle: an aircraft with no onboard pilot, and sometimes completely unpiloted, that is capable of controlled, sustained, level flight.
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 “UAV”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is U-A-V - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Don't mix it up with “up” - see the side-by-side comparison. UAV vs up
- 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.