km
The verdict
“km” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #1,030) as a symbol. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #1,030
- frequency rank, French
- 737
- “K” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Symbole du kilomètre, unité de mesure de longueur du Système international (SI), valant 1000 mètres (10³ mètres).
Corpus desk
Index FR-km · km · French
km · rank #1,030 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #1,030
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 737
- PHOTO-FINISH importante
Nearest frequency peer: importante (-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 « km »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- espèce
espèce
98,974 corpus weight
- faible
faible
98,973 corpus weight
- importante
importante
98,972 corpus weight
- km
km
98,971 corpus weight
- large
large
98,970 corpus weight
- lundi
lundi
98,969 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « km » 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 | km |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Symbol |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #1,030 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « km »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for km is neighbouring look-alikes ("ko", "kW", …), not just typos; it is asymbol. Frequency #1,030 among 737 “K” headwords. 3 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for km, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ko", "kW", "ku", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is km, spelled K-M.
Definition
- 1Symbole du kilomètre, unité de mesure de longueur du Système international (SI), valant 1000 mètres (10³ mètres).
- 2Symbole du préfixe kiloméga-, utilisé par le monde anglo-saxon au XXᵉ siècle.
- 3Code ISO 639-1 (alpha-2) du khmer.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how km appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Une auto qui venait en sens inverse éclaira un instant la borne kilométrique et Joseph Mittel se pencha juste à temps pour lire : Forges-les-Eaux, 2 km.
Ainsi, un échauffement de 5,2 km est organisé par l’Unesco, baptisé « course du petit-déjeuner » dès 8 h 30.
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.