bel
\bɛl\
The verdict
“bel” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #2,218) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #2,218
- frequency rank, French
- 4,251
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Unité sans dimension, de symbole B, utilisée pour exprimer les rapports de deux grandeurs de même espèce. Le bel est le logarithme décimal de ce rapport : autrement dit, un rapport de 10:1 vaut 1 b...
Corpus desk
Index FR-bel · bel · French
bel · rank #2,218 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #2,218
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,251
- PHOTO-FINISH bac
Nearest frequency peer: bac (-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 « bel »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- attendu
attendu
97,786 corpus weight
- auquel
auquel
97,785 corpus weight
- bac
bac
97,784 corpus weight
- bel
bel
97,783 corpus weight
- composé
composé
97,782 corpus weight
- conception
conception
97,781 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « bel » 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 | bel |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \bɛl\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #2,218 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « bel »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for bel is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "bu", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \bɛl\. Frequency #2,218 among 4,251 “B” headwords. Gloss: "Unité sans dimension, de symbole B, utilisée pour exprimer les rapports de deux grandeurs de même espèce. Le bel est le logarithme décimal de ce rapport : autrement dit, un rapport de 10:1 vaut 1 b...".
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for bel, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "by", "bu", "bi", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct French form is bel, spelled B-E-L.
Definition
- 1Unité sans dimension, de symbole B, utilisée pour exprimer les rapports de deux grandeurs de même espèce. Le bel est le logarithme décimal de ce rapport : autrement dit, un rapport de 10:1 vaut 1 bel. Les unités pratiques les plus courantes sont le décibel (dB) et le centibel (cB).
This word in other languages
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "bel", not the corpus desk frequency band.