mum

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for mum is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ˈmʌm\. Corpus data places it at rank #60,976 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: ", , , , , , , , Maman. Note d’usage : Mis en majuscule si le locuteur réfère à sa mère comme un nom propre.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for mum in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

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 mum, spelled M-U-M, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.