les
\le\
The verdict
“les” is in the everyday core of French, ranked #7 in French word frequency and used as an article.
- #7
- frequency rank, French
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Pluriel de le ou la.
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 | les |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Article |
| IPA | \le\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “les” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for les is 3 letters long, classified as an article, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \le\. Corpus data places it at rank #7 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language. Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
les has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Lu", "Li", "LR", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
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. The correct French form is les, spelled L-E-S.
Definition
- 1Pluriel de le ou la.
- 2. Singulier ou pluriel de le ou la.
This word in other languages
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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Using “les”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is L-E-S - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \le\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “Lu” - see the side-by-side comparison. les vs Lu
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.