espion
Letters
6 characters
Frequency Rank
#12,375
in French word usage
Misspellings
8
tracked variants
Confusables
3
similar word pairs
espion is aFrenchnoun. It means: Celui qui est chargé par un pays de recueillir clandestinement, dans un autre pays, des informations gardées secrètes ; celui qui espionne. Pronounced \ɛs.pjɔ̃\. Often confused with ESPN and espions.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | espion |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ɛs.pjɔ̃\ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #12,375 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 3 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for espion is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ɛs.pjɔ̃\. Corpus data places it at rank #12,375 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for espion, with forms such as "epsion", "esipon", and "espino". 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 3 confusable-pair relationships, "ESPN", "espions", "espionne", 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 espion, spelled E-S-P-I-O-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Celui qui est chargé par un pays de recueillir clandestinement, dans un autre pays, des informations gardées secrètes ; celui qui espionne.
- 2Catégorie de personnes ne bénéficiant pas du statut de combattant si elles ne font pas partie des forces armées et qui, si elles sont reconnues comme telle, perdent certains droits inscrit dans les conventions de Genève.
- 3Celui qui observe secrètement les activités d’autrui pour les rapporter à un tiers.
- 4Miroir permettant d’observer sans être vu.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: epsion,esipon,espino,espionn,espoin,esppion,esspion,sepion
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for espion
Misspelling Variants of "espion"
Frequency rank: #12,375 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter E in our French index: