paterne
\pa.tɛʁn\
The verdict
“paterne” is uncommon French (frequency #90,012 among 6,826 “P” headwords), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #90,012
- frequency rank, French
- 6,826
- “P” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Qui affecte les manières bienveillantes et le ton protecteur d’un père.
Corpus desk
Index FR-paterne · paterne · French
paterne · rank #90,012 · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-RARE #90,012
- LEN-LONG 7 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,826
- PHOTO-FINISH partageraient
Nearest frequency peer: partageraient (-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.
Rangs de longue queue près de « paterne »
Bande clairsemée: les barres inversent le rang pour que le rare se lise plus court
- parenchyme
parenchyme
9,992 corpus weight
- Parisian
Parisian
9,991 corpus weight
- partageraie…
partageraient
9,990 corpus weight
- paterne
paterne
9,989 corpus weight
- pavant
pavant
9,988 corpus weight
- pavots
pavots
9,987 corpus weight
What this shows Vue de longue queue: où « paterne » se situe face à des rangs français aussi rares.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | paterne |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| IPA | \pa.tɛʁn\ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #90,012 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « paterne » en français
Rare enough to double-check
paterne is uncommon French at frequency #90,012 among 6,826 “P” headwords, classed as anadjective, transcribed \pa.tɛʁn\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Qui affecte les manières bienveillantes et le ton protecteur d’un père.".
paterne has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct French form is paterne, spelled P-A-T-E-R-N-E.
Definition
- 1Qui affecte les manières bienveillantes et le ton protecteur d’un père.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how paterne appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Il me parla d’un ton paterne.
Cet homme appartenait évidemment à l’Église, il n’annonçait pas plus de cinquante à cinquante-cinq ans, on ne pouvait pas avoir l’air plus paterne.
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 "paterne", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 7 letters (nearest by frequency rank).