bu
The verdict
“bu” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #5,636) as an adjective. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #5,636
- frequency rank, French
- 4,251
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Absorbé, en parlant d’un liquide ou de sentiment (les sentiments étaient autrefois considérés comme des humeurs, au sens propre de quelque chose d’humide).
Corpus desk
Index FR-bu · bu · French
bu · rank #5,636 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #5,636
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,251
- PHOTO-FINISH brûler
Nearest frequency peer: brûler (-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 « bu »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- boston
boston
94,368 corpus weight
- brûler
brûler
94,366 corpus weight
- bu
bu
94,365 corpus weight
- bâton
bâton
94,364 corpus weight
- bêtes
bêtes
94,363 corpus weight
- cage
cage
94,362 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « bu » 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 | bu |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #5,636 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « bu »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for bu is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "BV", …), not just typos; it is anadjective. Frequency #5,636 among 4,251 “B” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
No misspelling variants are generated for bu in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "by", "BV", "BX", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is bu, spelled B-U.
Definition
- 1Absorbé, en parlant d’un liquide ou de sentiment (les sentiments étaient autrefois considérés comme des humeurs, au sens propre de quelque chose d’humide).
- 2Ivre.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how bu appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Avoir ses hontes bues, c’est-à-dire ravalées.
Ceux que l’on rencontrait maintenant étaient trop « bus », pour que l’on pût penser encore à discuter […] On tâchait seulement de les asseoir par terre, sans trop les abîmer : un soulard, c’est sacré !
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.