rare
Letters
4 characters
Frequency Rank
#1,785
in French word usage
Misspellings
5
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
rare is anFrenchadj. It means: Qui est en petit nombre ; qui se trouve difficilement. Pronounced \ʁaʁ\. It ranks #1,785 in French word frequency. Often confused with Re and rue.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | rare |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | \ʁaʁ\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #1,785 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for rare is 4 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ʁaʁ\. Corpus data places it at rank #1,785 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for rare, with forms such as "arre", "raer", and "rarre". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Re", "rue", "ray", 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 rare, spelled R-A-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Qui est en petit nombre ; qui se trouve difficilement.
- 2Qui est peu commun, peu courant.
- 3Qualifie une personne qui a un mérite extraordinaire.
- 4Qualifie une barbe clairsemée.
- 5Qualifie du pouls, lorsqu’il bat moins de fois qu'à l'ordinaire, dans un temps donné.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: arre,raer,rarre,rrae,rrare
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for rare
Misspelling Variants of "rare"
Frequency rank: #1,785 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter R in our French index: