bou
\bu\
The verdict
“bou” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #17,635) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #17,635
- frequency rank, French
- 4,251
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Sorte de thé.
Corpus desk
Index FR-bou · bou · French
bou · rank #17,635 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #17,635
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,251
- PHOTO-FINISH blouse
Nearest frequency peer: blouse (-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 « bou »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- Belgrade
Belgrade
82,369 corpus weight
- blablabla
blablabla
82,368 corpus weight
- blouse
blouse
82,367 corpus weight
- bou
bou
82,366 corpus weight
- bride
bride
82,365 corpus weight
- brusque
brusque
82,363 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « bou » 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 | bou |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \bu\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #17,635 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « bou »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for bou is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "bu", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \bu\. Frequency #17,635 among 4,251 “B” headwords. Gloss: "Sorte de thé.".
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for bou, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. 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 its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct French form is bou, spelled B-O-U.
Definition
- 1Sorte de thé.
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
How do you spell "bou"?
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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "bou", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).