écu
Letters
3 characters
Frequency Rank
#28,025
in French word usage
Misspellings
0
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
écu is aFrenchnoun. It means: Bouclier que portaient autrefois les chevaliers. Pronounced \e.ky\. Often confused with et and en.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | écu |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \e.ky\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #28,025 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for écu is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \e.ky\. Corpus data places it at rank #28,025 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for écu in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "et", "en", "Eu", 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 écu, spelled É-C-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Bouclier que portaient autrefois les chevaliers.
- 2Figure en forme d'écu stylisé sur lequel on pose les pièces honorables, les partitions, les meubles d’armoiries.
- 3Monnaie d’or ou d’argent frappée aux armes du souverain qui l’émettait.
- 4Ancienne monnaie de compte populaire.
- 5Appellation populaire des pièces de cinq francs frappées jusqu'en 1878.
- 6Marque quelconque en forme de blason.
- 7Richesse.
- 8Format français de papier défini par l'AFNOR avec les dimensions suivantes : 40 × 52 cm.
- 9Acronyme de l’anglais European Currency Unit (Unité de Compte Européenne ou UCE, en français) et qui servit de référence monétaire avant l’introduction de l’euro. Son symbole est ₠, ECU.
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #28,025 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter É in our French index: