lie
\li\
The verdict
“lie” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #7,855) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #7,855
- frequency rank, French
- 2,567
- “L” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Dépôt formé par précipitation dans une boisson, spécialement un liquide fermenté.
Corpus desk
Index FR-lie · lie · French
lie · rank #7,855 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #7,855
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 2,567
- PHOTO-FINISH lente
Nearest frequency peer: lente (-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 « lie »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- Kenya
Kenya
92,149 corpus weight
- laboratoires
laboratoires
92,148 corpus weight
- lente
lente
92,147 corpus weight
- lie
lie
92,146 corpus weight
- limoges
limoges
92,145 corpus weight
- lisant
lisant
92,144 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « lie » 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 | lie |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \li\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #7,855 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « lie »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for lie is neighbouring look-alikes ("Lu", "LR", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \li\. Frequency #7,855 among 2,567 “L” headwords. 4 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for lie, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Lu", "LR", "lo", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No documented word history exists for this headword, 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 lie, spelled L-I-E.
Definition
- 1Dépôt formé par précipitation dans une boisson, spécialement un liquide fermenté.
- 2Résidu précipité laissé par un liquide.
- 3Les mauvais éléments d’un peuple ou d’une population.
- 4Résidu couleur lie-de-vin.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how lie appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
J’ai de la lie de vin au fond de ma bouteille.
De ce vin, la première bouteille était un peu trouble vers la fin, Brisemont versa cette lie dans un verre.
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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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "lie", not the corpus desk frequency band.