retenir
Letters
7 characters
Frequency Rank
#3,565
in French word usage
Misspellings
10
tracked variants
Confusables
12
similar word pairs
retenir is aFrenchverb. It means: Garder par-devers soi ce qui est à un autre. Pronounced \ʁət.niʁ\. It ranks #3,565 in French word frequency. Often confused with retenu and revenir.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | retenir |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \ʁət.niʁ\ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #3,565 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 12 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for retenir is 7 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ʁət.niʁ\. Corpus data places it at rank #3,565 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 18 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for retenir, with forms such as "ertenir", "reetnir", and "reteinr". 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 12 confusable-pair relationships, "retenu", "revenir", "retenue", 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 retenir, spelled R-E-T-E-N-I-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Garder par-devers soi ce qui est à un autre.
- 2Garder toujours, conserver ce que l’on a, ne point s’en défaire, ne point s’en dessaisir.
- 3Se dit, dans ce sens, en parlant des habitudes, des qualités bonnes ou mauvaises que l’on n’a point perdues.
- 4Se souvenir, garder en mémoire.
- 5Réserver.
- 6Réserver un chiffre pour le joindre aux chiffres de la colonne suivante.
- 7Prélever, déduire d’une somme.
- 8S’assurer par précaution une personne, une chose.
- 9Arrêter, maintenir, faire demeurer.
- 10Saisir, tenir, pour empêcher un accident, une chute, ou pour s’opposer à une mauvaise action.
- 11Arrêter, contenir, ne pas laisser aller.
- 12Pour des chevaux de trait qui empêchent la voiture d’aller trop vite à une descente.
- 13Réprimer ; modérer ; empêcher de s’emporter.
- 14Mettre, imprimer, garder quelque chose dans sa mémoire.
- 15En parlant de la génération des animaux et signifie concevoir.
- 16S’arrêter avec effort.
- 17Ne pas satisfaire un besoin naturel
- 18Pour un cheval, qui ne veut pas se porter librement en avant.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ertenir,reetnir,reteinr,retenirr,retennir,retenri,retneir,rettenir,rretenir,rteenir
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for retenir
Misspelling Variants of "retenir"
Frequency rank: #3,565 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter R in our French index: