bougie
Letters
6 characters
Frequency Rank
#12,112
in French word usage
Misspellings
7
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
bougie is aFrenchnoun. It means: Chandelle de cire, de stéarine, de paraffine, servant d’éclairage ou utilisée dans certains rites religieux. Pronounced \bu.ʒi\. Often confused with boule and Bowie.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | bougie |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \bu.ʒi\ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #12,112 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for bougie is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \bu.ʒi\. Corpus data places it at rank #12,112 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 7 documented wrong-spelling variants for bougie, with forms such as "bbougie", "boguie", and "bougei". 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, "boule", "Bowie", "bouse", 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 bougie, spelled B-O-U-G-I-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Chandelle de cire, de stéarine, de paraffine, servant d’éclairage ou utilisée dans certains rites religieux.
- 2Sonde flexible ou rigide utilisée en chirurgie pour explorer ou dilater un canal de l’organisme (œsophage, rectum, etc.). En l'utilisant on effectue un bougirage.
- 3Filtre en céramique microporeuse dont la forme est cylindrique (d'où son nom). On l'utilise pour rendre l'eau potable.
- 4Bougie d’allumage ou bougie de préchauffage.
- 5Ancienne unité de mesure de l’intensité lumineuse, égale à 1,018 candela.
- 6Année, an (âge).
- 7Drôle de personnage.
- 8Guetteur surveillant l’arrivée du passeur à l’aéroport et prévenant les trafiquants si ce dernier est bloqué en douane.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: bbougie,boguie,bougei,bouggie,bouige,buogie,obugie
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for bougie
Misspelling Variants of "bougie"
Frequency rank: #12,112 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "bougie"?
What does "bougie" mean?
What words are commonly confused with "bougie"?
How do you pronounce "bougie"?
What language does "bougie" come from?
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our French index: