ancien
Letters
6 characters
Frequency Rank
#474
in French word usage
Misspellings
8
tracked variants
Confusables
13
similar word pairs
ancien is anFrenchadj. It means: Qui existe depuis très longtemps. Pronounced \ɑ̃.sjɛ̃\. It ranks #474 in French word frequency. Often confused with Annie and ancre.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | ancien |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | \ɑ̃.sjɛ̃\ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #474 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 13 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for ancien is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ɑ̃.sjɛ̃\. Corpus data places it at rank #474 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for ancien, with forms such as "acnien", "anccien", and "ancein". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "Annie", "ancre", "Angie", 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 ancien, spelled A-N-C-I-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Qui existe depuis très longtemps.
- 2Antique, concernant une époque historique précédant le Moyen Âge.
- 3Se dit de quelqu’un qui a changé de situation ou de quelque chose qui a changé de destination.
- 4Arbres réservés qui ont plus de trois fois l’âge du taillis dans lequel ils se trouvent, par opposition à moderne.
- 5Sert aussi à distinguer un personnage historique d’un autre portant le même nom.
- 6Sens littéral :
- 7Sens derivé :
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: acnien,anccien,ancein,ancienn,ancine,anicen,anncien,nacien
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for ancien
Misspelling Variants of "ancien"
Frequency rank: #474 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter A in our French index: