-ain
Letters
4 characters
Language
French
word origin
Misspellings
0
tracked variants
Confusables
0
similar word pairs
-ain is aFrenchsuffix. It means: Suffixe servant à former les adjectifs et les noms d’habitants masculins de quelques continents, pays, provinces et villes. Pronounced \ɛ̃\.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | -ain |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Suffix |
| IPA | \ɛ̃\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for -ain is 4 letters long, classified as asuffix, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ɛ̃\. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for -ain in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct French form is -ain, spelled --A-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Suffixe servant à former les adjectifs et les noms d’habitants masculins de quelques continents, pays, provinces et villes.
- 2Suffixe servant à former un certain nombre d’adjectifs masculins.
- 3Suffixe marquant l’ancien cas régime de quelques noms féminins.
This word in other languages
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "-ain"?
What does "-ain" mean?
How do you pronounce "-ain"?
What language does "-ain" come from?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter - in our French index: