fay
\fɛ\
The verdict
“fay” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #31,488) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #31,488
- frequency rank, French
- 3,276
- “F” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Division d’un bloc d’ardoise.
Corpus desk
Index FR-fay · fay · French
fay · rank #31,488 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #31,488
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 3,276
- PHOTO-FINISH farces
Nearest frequency peer: farces (-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 « fay »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- expliquerai
expliquerai
68,516 corpus weight
- faf
faf
68,515 corpus weight
- farces
farces
68,514 corpus weight
- fay
fay
68,513 corpus weight
- feint
feint
68,512 corpus weight
- fendre
fendre
68,511 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « fay » 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 | fay |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \fɛ\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #31,488 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « fay »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for fay is neighbouring look-alikes ("FN", "FC", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \fɛ\. Frequency #31,488 among 3,276 “F” headwords. Gloss: "Division d’un bloc d’ardoise.".
Zero misspellings are on record for fay in our index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "FN", "FC", "fo", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so its spelling is easiest explained by how it's pronounced rather than where it came from. The correct French form is fay, spelled F-A-Y.
Definition
- 1Division d’un bloc d’ardoise.
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 "fay", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).