few
\ˈfju\
The verdict
“few” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #33,682) as an adjective. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #33,682
- frequency rank, French
- 3,276
- “F” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Peu de, presque aucun. Utilisé pour les dénombrables.
Corpus desk
Index FR-few · few · French
few · rank #33,682 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #33,682
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 3,276
- PHOTO-FINISH fear
Nearest frequency peer: fear (-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 « few »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- fairy
fairy
66,322 corpus weight
- faufiler
faufiler
66,321 corpus weight
- fear
fear
66,320 corpus weight
- few
few
66,319 corpus weight
- fiduciaire
fiduciaire
66,318 corpus weight
- Finlandaise
Finlandaise
66,316 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « few » 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 | few |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| IPA | \ˈfju\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #33,682 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « few »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for few is neighbouring look-alikes ("FN", "fo", …), not just typos; it is anadjective pronounced \ˈfju\. Frequency #33,682 among 3,276 “F” headwords. Gloss: "Peu de, presque aucun. Utilisé pour les dénombrables.".
few doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "FN", "fo", "fm", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct French form is few, spelled F-E-W.
Definition
- 1Peu de, presque aucun. Utilisé pour les dénombrables.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how few appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
I was expecting lots of people at the party, but very few turned up.
There are few people who understand quantum theory.
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 "few", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).