by
[bɛi]
The verdict
“by” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #2,381) as a preposition. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #2,381
- frequency rank, Spanish
- 2,459
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A, en.
Corpus desk
Index ES-by · by · Spanish
by · rank #2,381 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #2,381
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 2,459
- PHOTO-FINISH Bajos
Nearest frequency peer: Bajos (-1 rank slots)
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.
Vecinos de frecuencia del confusable “by”
Pares de peso similar en el corpus, aparte de los confusables abajo
- argumento
argumento
97,623 corpus weight
- ataques
ataques
97,622 corpus weight
- Bajos
Bajos
97,621 corpus weight
- by
by
97,620 corpus weight
- caminar
caminar
97,619 corpus weight
- Canales
Canales
97,618 corpus weight
What this shows Las barras sitúan “by” frente a los lemas españoles más cercanos por rango, no un reprint del escritorio de confusables.
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 | by |
| Language | Spanish |
| Part of speech | Preposition |
| IPA | [bɛi] |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #2,381 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rango de corpus junto a confusables de “by”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for by is neighbouring look-alikes ("bye", "b", …), not just typos; it is apreposition pronounced [bɛi]. Frequency #2,381 among 2,459 “B” headwords. Gloss: "A, en.".
by doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "bye", "b", "be", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No documented word history exists for this headword, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct Spanish form is by, spelled B-Y.
Definition
- 1A, en.
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 Spanish corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.