dry
\dʁaj\
The verdict
“dry” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #29,733) as an adjective. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #29,733
- frequency rank, French
- 5,307
- “D” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Sec.
Corpus desk
Index FR-dry · dry · French
dry · rank #29,733 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #29,733
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,307
- PHOTO-FINISH drug
Nearest frequency peer: drug (-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 « dry »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- dow
dow
70,271 corpus weight
- Drancy
Drancy
70,270 corpus weight
- drug
drug
70,269 corpus weight
- dry
dry
70,268 corpus weight
- décente
décente
70,267 corpus weight
- déchaîne
déchaîne
70,266 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « dry » 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 | dry |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| IPA | \dʁaj\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #29,733 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « dry »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for dry is neighbouring look-alikes ("du", "Ds", …), not just typos; it is anadjective pronounced \dʁaj\. Frequency #29,733 among 5,307 “D” headwords. Gloss: "Sec.".
dry has no tracked misspelling variants, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "du", "Ds", "dt", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct French form is dry, spelled D-R-Y.
Definition
- 1Sec.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how dry appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Comme il se sentait un besoin incoercible de réfléchir, mais de réfléchir génialement, comme disait ce modeste, il commanda un martini dry.
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 "dry", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).