clef

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for clef is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \kle\. Corpus data places it at rank #6,063 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Variante orthographique de clé.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for clef, with forms such as "cclef", "celf", and "cleff". 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, "CPE", "coe", "Cré", 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 clef, spelled C-L-E-F, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.