machin
Letters
6 characters
Frequency Rank
#10,738
in French word usage
Misspellings
9
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
machin is aFrenchnoun. It means: Mot général utilisé pour désigner une notion ou un objet qu’on ne veut pas ou qu’on ne sait pas nommer plus précisément (pour une personne on dit : Machin). Pronounced \ma.ʃɛ̃\. Often confused with main and matin.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | machin |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ma.ʃɛ̃\ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #10,738 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for machin is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ma.ʃɛ̃\. Corpus data places it at rank #10,738 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for machin, with forms such as "amchin", "macchin", and "machhin". 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, "main", "matin", "marin", 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 machin, spelled M-A-C-H-I-N, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Mot général utilisé pour désigner une notion ou un objet qu’on ne veut pas ou qu’on ne sait pas nommer plus précisément (pour une personne on dit : Machin).
- 2S'emploie également quand le contexte permet de préciser le sens.
- 3Pour remplacer certains mots tabous.
- 4Pour désigner une chose incongrue.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: amchin,macchin,machhin,machinn,machni,macihn,mahcin,mcahin,mmachin
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for machin
Misspelling Variants of "machin"
Frequency rank: #10,738 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our French index: