buy
\baɪ\
The verdict
“buy” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #19,771) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #19,771
- frequency rank, French
- 4,251
- “B” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Achat, acquisition.
Corpus desk
Index FR-buy · buy · French
buy · rank #19,771 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #19,771
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,251
- PHOTO-FINISH broche
Nearest frequency peer: broche (-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 « buy »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- briquet
briquet
80,233 corpus weight
- brisés
brisés
80,232 corpus weight
- broche
broche
80,231 corpus weight
- buy
buy
80,230 corpus weight
- cadets
cadets
80,229 corpus weight
- calice
calice
80,228 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « buy » 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 | buy |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \baɪ\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #19,771 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « buy »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for buy is neighbouring look-alikes ("by", "BV", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \baɪ\. Frequency #19,771 among 4,251 “B” headwords. Gloss: "Achat, acquisition.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for buy, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "by", "BV", "BX", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so its spelling pattern is best understood through pronunciation rather than a traceable origin. The correct French form is buy, spelled B-U-Y.
Definition
- 1Achat, acquisition.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how buy appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
What is your best buy?
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 "buy", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).