May
\me\
The verdict
“May” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #7,083) as a proper noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #7,083
- frequency rank, French
- 5,038
- “M” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Nom de famille.
Corpus desk
Index FR-may · May · French
May · rank #7,083 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #7,083
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,038
- PHOTO-FINISH mannequin
Nearest frequency peer: mannequin (-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 « May »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- Lambert
Lambert
92,921 corpus weight
- manifesteme…
manifestement
92,920 corpus weight
- mannequin
mannequin
92,919 corpus weight
- May
May
92,918 corpus weight
- men
men
92,917 corpus weight
- meurtres
meurtres
92,916 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « May » 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 | May |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| IPA | \me\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #7,083 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « May »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for May is neighbouring look-alikes ("me", "mm", …), not just typos; it is aproper noun pronounced \me\. Frequency #7,083 among 5,038 “M” headwords. Gloss: "Nom de famille.".
No misspelling variants are generated for May in our index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "me", "mm", "mi", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is May, spelled M-A-Y.
Definition
- 1Nom de famille.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how May appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Le procureur Thierry May disparaît derrière les dix tonnes du dossier Ré Sécurité.
En 2016, la mort de la mannequin américaine Katie May après un AVC, dont le médecin légiste a établi l’origine comme étant « la manipulation du cou par un chiropracteur », est sans doute le cas le plus emblématique.
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 "May", not the corpus desk frequency band.