punaise
Letters
7 characters
Frequency Rank
#18,843
in French word usage
Misspellings
9
tracked variants
Confusables
5
similar word pairs
punaise is aFrenchnoun. It means: Nom désignant de nombreuses sortes d’insectes, souvent de forme plate, qui émettent une odeur désagréable lorsqu’ils sont effrayés ou tués. Pronounced \py.nɛz\. Often confused with punis and punie.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | punaise |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \py.nɛz\ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #18,843 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 5 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for punaise is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \py.nɛz\. Corpus data places it at rank #18,843 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for punaise, with forms such as "pnuaise", "ppunaise", and "puanise". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 5 confusable-pair relationships, "punis", "punie", "puisé", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
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. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct French form is punaise, spelled P-U-N-A-I-S-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Nom désignant de nombreuses sortes d’insectes, souvent de forme plate, qui émettent une odeur désagréable lorsqu’ils sont effrayés ou tués.
- 2Personne petite, malingre, peu imposante.
- 3Personne malveillante.
- 4(Par analogie de forme) Petit clou court, à tête plate et large, dont on se sert pour fixer au mur ou sur une planche des feuilles de papier, des images, des affiches, etc.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: pnuaise,ppunaise,puanise,punaies,punaisse,punasie,puniase,punnaise,upnaise
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for punaise
Misspelling Variants of "punaise"
Frequency rank: #18,843 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our French index: