pau
\po\
The verdict
“pau” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #8,284) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #8,284
- frequency rank, French
- 6,826
- “P” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Variante de pal.
Corpus desk
Index FR-pau · pau · French
pau · rank #8,284 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #8,284
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,826
- PHOTO-FINISH parrain
Nearest frequency peer: parrain (-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 « pau »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- paires
paires
91,719 corpus weight
- parrain
parrain
91,718 corpus weight
- pau
pau
91,717 corpus weight
- perles
perles
91,716 corpus weight
- piquer
piquer
91,715 corpus weight
- positives
positives
91,714 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « pau » 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 | pau |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \po\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #8,284 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « pau »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for pau is neighbouring look-alikes ("pu", "PS", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \po\. Frequency #8,284 among 6,826 “P” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for pau, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. 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.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, 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 pau, spelled P-A-U.
Definition
- 1Variante de pal.
- 2Échalas pour vignes hautes.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how pau appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Il ne restera plus ensuite qu’à ficher les paux aux endroits nécessaires, le premier qui est le pau de derriere, sera piqué à sept ou huit pas du lit … ; le deuxieme qui est le pau forceau, doit être cogné en terre à six ou sept pieds du bout du lit.
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 "pau", not the corpus desk frequency band.