pretendre
\pɾe.ten.ˈðɾe\
The verdict
“pretendre” is an uncommon French word, ranked #90,059 in French word frequency and used as a verb.
- #90,059
- frequency rank, French
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Aspirer à, prétendre à.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | pretendre |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \pɾe.ten.ˈðɾe\ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Frequency rank | #90,059 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “pretendre” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for pretendre is 9 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \pɾe.ten.ˈðɾe\. Corpus data places it at rank #90,059 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Aspirer à, prétendre à.".
pretendre has no tracked misspelling variants, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. 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.
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. The correct French form is pretendre, spelled P-R-E-T-E-N-D-R-E.
Definition
- 1Aspirer à, prétendre à.
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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Using “pretendre”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is P-R-E-T-E-N-D-R-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \pɾe.ten.ˈðɾe\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.