ancêtre
Letters
7 characters
Frequency Rank
#13,311
in French word usage
Misspellings
11
tracked variants
Confusables
4
similar word pairs
ancêtre is aFrenchnoun. It means: Celui ou celle de qui l’on descend par son père ou sa mère. Pronounced \ɑ̃.sɛtʁ\. Often confused with ancre and antre.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | ancêtre |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ɑ̃.sɛtʁ\ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #13,311 |
| Misspellings tracked | 11 |
| Confusable pairs | 4 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for ancêtre is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ɑ̃.sɛtʁ\. Corpus data places it at rank #13,311 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 11 documented wrong-spelling variants for ancêtre, with forms such as "acnêtre", "anccêtre", and "ancetre". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 4 confusable-pair relationships, "ancre", "antre", "Annette", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
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 ancêtre, spelled A-N-C-Ê-T-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Celui ou celle de qui l’on descend par son père ou sa mère.
- 2Ceux qui sont au-dessus du degré de grand-parent.
- 3Tous ceux qui nous ont devancés, encore que nous ne soyons pas de leur ethnie.
- 4Personne âgée, du troisième âge.
- 5Ce qui a précédé quelque chose d’autre dans l’histoire.
Antonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: acnêtre,anccêtre,ancetre,anctêre,ancêrte,ancêter,ancêtrre,ancêttre,anncêtre,anêctre,nacêtre
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for ancêtre
Misspelling Variants of "ancêtre"
Frequency rank: #13,311 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our French index: