B
\be\
The verdict
“B” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #666) as a character. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #666
- frequency rank, French
- 4,251
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Deuxième lettre et première consonne de l’alphabet latin (en majuscule).
Corpus desk
Index FR-b · B · French
B · rank #666 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-CORE #666
- LEN-SHORT 1 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,251
- PHOTO-FINISH ami
Nearest frequency peer: ami (-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.
Voisins de fréquence du confusable « B »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- troisième
troisième
99,338 corpus weight
- aider
aider
99,337 corpus weight
- ami
ami
99,336 corpus weight
- B
B
99,335 corpus weight
- campagne
campagne
99,334 corpus weight
- coupe
coupe
99,333 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « B » face aux lemmes français les plus proches par rang, pas un reprint du bureau des 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 | B |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Character |
| IPA | \be\ |
| Letters | 1 |
| Frequency rank | #666 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « B »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for B is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "be", …), not just typos; it is acharacter pronounced \be\. Frequency #666 among 4,251 “B” headwords. Gloss: "Deuxième lettre et première consonne de l’alphabet latin (en majuscule).".
Zero misspellings are on record for B in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "by", "be", "BD", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct French form is B, spelled B.
Definition
- 1Deuxième lettre et première consonne de l’alphabet latin (en majuscule).
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 French corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.