levain
Letters
6 characters
Frequency Rank
#34,162
in French word usage
Misspellings
8
tracked variants
Confusables
13
similar word pairs
levain is aFrenchnoun. It means: Morceau de pâte aigrie qui, mêlée à la pâte dont on veut faire du pain, sert à la faire lever, à la faire fermenter. Pronounced \lə.vɛ̃\. Often confused with levi and levis.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | levain |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \lə.vɛ̃\ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #34,162 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 13 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for levain is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \lə.vɛ̃\. Corpus data places it at rank #34,162 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 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for levain, with forms such as "elvain", "leavin", and "levainn". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "levi", "levis", "levant", 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 levain, spelled L-E-V-A-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Morceau de pâte aigrie qui, mêlée à la pâte dont on veut faire du pain, sert à la faire lever, à la faire fermenter.
- 2Substance capable de produire une fermentation interne dans le corps avec lequel on l’a mêlé et d’y exciter un gonflement.
- 3Germes de certaines passions violentes.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: elvain,leavin,levainn,levani,levian,levvain,llevain,lveain
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for levain
Misspelling Variants of "levain"
Frequency rank: #34,162 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our French index: