pan
\pɑ̃\
The verdict
“pan” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #6,726) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #6,726
- frequency rank, French
- 6,826
- “P” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Partie plane et plus ou moins large d’un mur.
Corpus desk
Index FR-pan · pan · French
pan · rank #6,726 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #6,726
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,826
- PHOTO-FINISH pa
Nearest frequency peer: pa (-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 « pan »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- ouvertement
ouvertement
93,278 corpus weight
- ouvrent
ouvrent
93,277 corpus weight
- pa
pa
93,276 corpus weight
- pan
pan
93,275 corpus weight
- Pauline
Pauline
93,274 corpus weight
- PDG
PDG
93,273 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « pan » 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 | pan |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \pɑ̃\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #6,726 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « pan »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for pan is neighbouring look-alikes ("pu", "PS", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \pɑ̃\. Frequency #6,726 among 6,826 “P” headwords. 5 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
pan doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "pu", "PS", "PQ", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct French form is pan, spelled P-A-N.
Definition
- 1Partie plane et plus ou moins large d’un mur.
- 2Partie retombante d’un vêtement.
- 3Face plane d’un objet.
- 4Face d’un solide polyédrique.
- 5Morceau, partie délimitée de quelque chose.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how pan appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Un pan du mur s’est écroulé.
Près de là, au-dessus des touffes de bois, les hautes masures de l'abbaye de Thiers découpaient sur l'horizon leurs pans de muraille percés de trèfles et d'ogives.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "pan", not the corpus desk frequency band.