hmm
The verdict
“hmm” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #10,171) as an interjection. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #10,171
- frequency rank, French
- 1,969
- “H” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Variante de hum, hm, exprime l’hésitation.
Corpus desk
Index FR-hmm · hmm · French
hmm · rank #10,171 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #10,171
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 1,969
- PHOTO-FINISH Harvard
Nearest frequency peer: Harvard (-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 « hmm »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- garantit
garantit
89,833 corpus weight
- grange
grange
89,832 corpus weight
- Harvard
Harvard
89,831 corpus weight
- hmm
hmm
89,830 corpus weight
- humides
humides
89,829 corpus weight
- icône
icône
89,828 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « hmm » 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 | hmm |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Interjection |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #10,171 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « hmm »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for hmm is neighbouring look-alikes ("hp", "Hs", …), not just typos; it is aninterjection. Frequency #10,171 among 1,969 “H” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
No generated misspelling entries exist for hmm in our index, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "hp", "Hs", "hr", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct French form is hmm, spelled H-M-M.
Definition
- 1Variante de hum, hm, exprime l’hésitation.
- 2Variante de mm, marque l'appréciation positive.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how hmm appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Ce que cela veut dire ? Hmm, je n'en sais rien.
— Permettez, je m’appelle Baumer. Vous me plaisez. Vous jouez certainement de la guitare, non ? — Pourquoi, j’ai une tête à ça ? — Hmm, je ne sais pas.— (Beat Brechbuehl, Basile, 1990)
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 "hmm", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).