ni
\ni\
The verdict
“ni” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #274) as a conjunction. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #274
- frequency rank, French
- 1,563
- “N” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Conjonction de coordination négative qui correspond à et affirmatif.
Corpus desk
Index FR-ni · ni · French
ni · rank #274 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-CORE #274
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 1,563
- PHOTO-FINISH partir
Nearest frequency peer: partir (+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 « ni »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- effet
effet
99,731 corpus weight
- jean
jean
99,729 corpus weight
- ni
ni
99,727 corpus weight
- partir
partir
99,726 corpus weight
- surtout
surtout
99,725 corpus weight
- choses
choses
99,723 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « ni » 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 | ni |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Conjunction |
| IPA | \ni\ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #274 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « ni »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for ni is neighbouring look-alikes ("no", "nu", …), not just typos; it is aconjunction pronounced \ni\. Frequency #274 among 1,563 “N” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
Zero misspellings are on record for ni in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "no", "nu", "ny", 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, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct French form is ni, spelled N-I.
Definition
- 1Conjonction de coordination négative qui correspond à et affirmatif.
- 2Entre deux propositions :
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how ni appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
La véritable affaire n'était pas encore commencée. On n'entendait ni les cris antidynastiques qui étaient attendus ni le grondement orageux de La Marseillaise.
Donc, plus de fausse pudeur ni de sensiblerie de mauvais aloi.
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.