\pe.de.ɛf\
The verdict
“PDF” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #8,903) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #8,903
- frequency rank, French
- 6,826
- “P” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Format de document portable, conçu à l'origine pour ne pas être modifiable.
Corpus desk
Index FR-pdf · PDF · French
PDF · rank #8,903 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #8,903
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,826
- PHOTO-FINISH payée
Nearest frequency peer: payée (-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 « PDF »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- parade
parade
91,101 corpus weight
- parceque
parceque
91,100 corpus weight
- payée
payée
91,099 corpus weight
- PDF
PDF
91,098 corpus weight
- peintres
peintres
91,097 corpus weight
- perpignan
perpignan
91,096 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « PDF » 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 | |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \pe.de.ɛf\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #8,903 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « PDF »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for PDF is neighbouring look-alikes ("pu", "PS", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \pe.de.ɛf\. Frequency #8,903 among 6,826 “P” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for PDF, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "pu", "PS", "PQ", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is PDF, spelled P-D-F.
Definition
- 1Format de document portable, conçu à l'origine pour ne pas être modifiable.
- 2Document encodé dans ce format.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how PDF appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Je t’ai envoyé un PDF par email.
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 "PDF", not the corpus desk frequency band.