balai
Letters
5 characters
Frequency Rank
#15,809
in French word usage
Misspellings
6
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
balai is aFrenchnoun. It means: Outil fait d’un faisceau souple, composé de fibres végétales ou synthétiques, ou d’une brosse, fixée au bout d’un long manche et destiné à nettoyer les poussières et déchets tombés au sol. Pronounced \ba.lɛ\. Often confused with ball and bâti.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | balai |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ba.lɛ\ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #15,809 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for balai is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ba.lɛ\. Corpus data places it at rank #15,809 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for balai, with forms such as "ablai", "baali", and "balia". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ball", "bâti", "bali", 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 balai, spelled B-A-L-A-I, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Outil fait d’un faisceau souple, composé de fibres végétales ou synthétiques, ou d’une brosse, fixée au bout d’un long manche et destiné à nettoyer les poussières et déchets tombés au sol.
- 2Sorte de balai-brosse servant à jouer au curling
- 3Pièce conductrice, à l’origine flexible, chargée d’assurer une liaison électrique entre un organe fixe et un autre mobile. Il permet par exemple de capter ou d’amener le courant électrique au collecteur ou bagues, d’une machine électrique tournante.
- 4Instrument pour débarrasser l’œsophage.
- 5Sorte de pinceau pour faire la peinture sur verre.
- 6Type de baguette de batterie dont la forme, terminée par des brins en faisceau, rappelle un balai ménager.
- 7Queue d’un oiseau, ou bout de la queue d’un chien.
- 8An, quand on donne un âge.
- 9Droits d'administrateur sur un projet Wikimédia.
- 10Meuble représentant l’outil du même nom dans les armoiries. Il est représenté en pal, le manche vers le chef.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ablai,baali,balia,ballai,bbalai,blaai
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for balai
Misspelling Variants of "balai"
Frequency rank: #15,809 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our French index: