maintenaient
\mɛ̃.tə.nɛ\
The verdict
“maintenaient” is uncommon French (frequency #63,154 among 5,038 “M” headwords), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #63,154
- frequency rank, French
- 5,038
- “M” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Troisième personne du pluriel de l’imparfait de maintenir.
Corpus desk
Index FR-maintenaient · maintenaient · French
maintenaient · rank #63,154 · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-RARE #63,154
- LEN-MEGA 12 letters
- VOW-6 6 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,038
- PHOTO-FINISH Malagré
Nearest frequency peer: Malagré (+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.
Rangs de longue queue près de « maintenaient »
Bande clairsemée: les barres inversent le rang pour que le rare se lise plus court
- Maddy
Maddy
36,851 corpus weight
- magyar
magyar
36,849 corpus weight
- maintenaient
maintenaient
36,847 corpus weight
- Malagré
Malagré
36,846 corpus weight
- maori
maori
36,845 corpus weight
- maquillés
maquillés
36,844 corpus weight
What this shows Vue de longue queue: où « maintenaient » se situe face à des rangs français aussi rares.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | maintenaient |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \mɛ̃.tə.nɛ\ |
| Letters | 12 |
| Frequency rank | #63,154 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « maintenaient » en français
Rare enough to double-check
maintenaient is uncommon French at frequency #63,154 among 5,038 “M” headwords, classed as averb, transcribed \mɛ̃.tə.nɛ\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Troisième personne du pluriel de l’imparfait de maintenir.".
No misspelling variants are generated for maintenaient in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct French form is maintenaient, spelled M-A-I-N-T-E-N-A-I-E-N-T.
Definition
- 1Troisième personne du pluriel de l’imparfait de maintenir.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how maintenaient appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Sixte du Châtelet portait un pantalon d’une blancheur éblouissante, à sous-pieds intérieurs qui le maintenaient dans ses plis.
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 "maintenaient", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 12 letters (nearest by frequency rank).