doyen
Letters
5 characters
Frequency Rank
#9,154
in French word usage
Misspellings
7
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
doyen is aFrenchnoun. It means: Celui qui est le plus ancien suivant l’ordre de réception dans un corps, dans une compagnie. Pronounced \dwa.jɛ̃\. It ranks #9,154 in French word frequency. Often confused with doyenne and don.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | doyen |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \dwa.jɛ̃\ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #9,154 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for doyen is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \dwa.jɛ̃\. Corpus data places it at rank #9,154 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 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 doyen, with forms such as "ddoyen", "doeyn", and "doyenn". 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, "doyenne", "don", "den", 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 doyen, spelled D-O-Y-E-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Celui qui est le plus ancien suivant l’ordre de réception dans un corps, dans une compagnie.
- 2Nom désignant soit le nonce apostolique, soit l'ambassadeur ayant passé le plus de temps dans le pays d'accueil. Il a dès lors le rôle de porte-parole du corps diplomatique auprès du chef du protocole du pays d'accueil sur les questions administratives.
- 3Titre de dignité ecclésiastique.
- 4Titre de la première dignité dans les facultés d’une université.
- 5Le plus ancien en âge. On dit aussi en ce sens doyen d’âge, mais seulement dans les assemblées ou compagnies délibérantes.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ddoyen,doeyn,doyenn,doyne,doyyen,dyoen,odyen
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for doyen
Misspelling Variants of "doyen"
Frequency rank: #9,154 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our French index: