blé
\ble\
The verdict
“blé” is a regularly-used French word, ranked #5,427 in French word frequency and used as a noun.
- #5,427
- frequency rank, French
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) — Terme générique qui désigne plusieurs céréales appartenant au genre Triticum. Ce sont des plantes annuelles de la famille des graminées ou Poacées, cultivées dans de très nombreux pays pour obtenir...
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 | blé |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ble\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #5,427 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “blé” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for blé is 3 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ble\. Corpus data places it at rank #5,427 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for blé in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "by", "bu", "Br", 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 blé, spelled B-L-É, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Terme générique qui désigne plusieurs céréales appartenant au genre Triticum. Ce sont des plantes annuelles de la famille des graminées ou Poacées, cultivées dans de très nombreux pays pour obtenir de la farine permettant de faire du pain.
- 2Couleur jaune chaud légèrement brillant. #E8D630
- 3Grain produit par ces plantes.
- 4Champ de blé.
- 5Argent, fric.
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.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “blé, French word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/fr/mot/ble
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “blé”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is B-L-É - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \ble\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “by” - see the side-by-side comparison. blé vs by
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our French index: