lest
Letters
4 characters
Frequency Rank
#27,865
in French word usage
Misspellings
6
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
lest is aFrenchnoun. It means: Pierres, sable ou autres matières pesantes dont on charge le fond d’un bateau pour lui donner la stabilité convenable, en le faisant suffisamment entrer dans l’eau. Pronounced \lɛst\. Often confused with LT and LS.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | lest |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \lɛst\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #27,865 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for lest is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \lɛst\. Corpus data places it at rank #27,865 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for lest, with forms such as "elst", "lesst", and "lestt". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "LT", "LS", "lit", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
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. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct French form is lest, spelled L-E-S-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Pierres, sable ou autres matières pesantes dont on charge le fond d’un bateau pour lui donner la stabilité convenable, en le faisant suffisamment entrer dans l’eau.
- 2Sacs de sable qui sont placés dans la nacelle d’un ballon et qu’on jette pour donner plus de légèreté au ballon.
- 3Poids supplémentaire porté dans un planeur pour déplacer le domaine de performance optimale vers des vitesses supérieures. Souvent de l’eau est stockée dans une soute, et peut être évacué pendant le vol.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: elst,lesst,lestt,lets,llest,lset
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for lest
Misspelling Variants of "lest"
Frequency rank: #27,865 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our French index: