nous
Letters
4 characters
Frequency Rank
#50
in French word usage
Misspellings
5
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
nous is aFrenchpron. It means: Pronom de la première personne du pluriel, incluant le locuteur ainsi que d’autres personnes au nom de qui il parle, utilisable en sujet, en complément d’objet, ou en tant que pronom tonique pour m... Pronounced \nu\. It ranks #50 in French word frequency. Often confused with nu and NS.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | nous |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Pron |
| IPA | \nu\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #50 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for nous is 4 letters long, classified as apron, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \nu\. Corpus data places it at rank #50 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for nous, with forms such as "nnous", "nosu", and "nouss". 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, "nu", "NS", "nul", 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 nous, spelled N-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Pronom de la première personne du pluriel, incluant le locuteur ainsi que d’autres personnes au nom de qui il parle, utilisable en sujet, en complément d’objet, ou en tant que pronom tonique pour marquer l’insistance sur la personne.
- 2Se dit souvent pour désigner une collectivité dont fait partie la personne qui parle, qu’il s’agisse de l’humanité, d’un pays, d’une province, d’une famille, ou encore de gens ayant en commun des idées, des croyances, une formation, des habitudes, etc.
- 3S’emploie aussi quelquefois, dans le registre familier, au lieu du pronom personnel il ou elle.
- 4À l’époque des rois, remplaçait le singulier je ou moi dans les lois, dans les ordonnances, etc.
- 5Pronom personnel sujet de la deuxième personne du singulier, tu.
- 6Dans les romans, essais, travaux universitaires, remplace les pronoms je, me, moi pour désigner l'auteur du texte (voir nous de modestie).
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: nnous,nosu,nouss,nuos,onus
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for nous
Misspelling Variants of "nous"
Frequency rank: #50 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter N in our French index: