certain
Letters
7 characters
Frequency Rank
#705
in French word usage
Misspellings
10
tracked variants
Confusables
6
similar word pairs
certain is anFrenchadj. It means: Indubitable. Pronounced \sɛʁ.tɛ̃\. It ranks #705 in French word frequency. Often confused with châtain and certains.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | certain |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | \sɛʁ.tɛ̃\ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #705 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 6 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for certain is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \sɛʁ.tɛ̃\. Corpus data places it at rank #705 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for certain, with forms such as "ccertain", "ceratin", and "cerrtain". 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 6 confusable-pair relationships, "châtain", "certains", "certaine", 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 certain, spelled C-E-R-T-A-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Indubitable.
- 2Fixé ; déterminé.
- 3Qui est assuré d’une chose, qui en a la certitude.
- 4Qui est à déterminer ; qu’on ne veut pas déterminer. — Note d’usage : Dans ce sens, on met certain devant le nom.
- 5D’une façon indéterminée, pour atténuer ce qu’une expression aurait de trop absolu.
- 6Précédé de un ou une et suivi d'un nom propre, désigne une personne sur laquelle on sait peu de choses ou à l'inverse (souvent avec ironie) très célèbre.
- 7Qualifiait des fruits gâtés ou pourris.
- 8Se dit d’un événement comprenant toutes les éventualités d’une expérience aléatoire, autrement dit, égal à l’univers.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccertain,ceratin,cerrtain,certainn,certani,certian,certtain,cetrain,cretain,ecrtain
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for certain
Misspelling Variants of "certain"
Frequency rank: #705 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our French index: