schwa

/\ʃva\/ noun

Letters

5 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

schwa is aFrenchnoun. It means: Voyelle neutre, de son /ə/ en API, intercalée sans signification phonologique et parfois de manière facultative entre deux consonnes. Pronounced \ʃva\.

Key facts for schwa
PropertyValue
Headwordschwa
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\ʃva\
Letters5
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

schwa is not present in the top-100,000 ranked French corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for schwa is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ʃva\. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for schwa in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

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 schwa, spelled S-C-H-W-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Voyelle neutre, de son /ə/ en API, intercalée sans signification phonologique et parfois de manière facultative entre deux consonnes.
  2. 2
    symbole de l’alphabet phonétique international ou d’autres systèmes de transcription phonétique composé d’un e culbuté et représentant cette voyelle neutre centrale.
  3. 3
    Phonème de l'hébreu qui dénote soit l’absence de voyelle, soit une voyelle, et qui est représenté par deux points souscrits sous la consonne qui le précède dans la prononciation.

Synonyms

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "schwa"?
"schwa" is spelled S-C-H-W-A. The IPA pronunciation is \ʃva\.
What does "schwa" mean?
As a noun, "schwa" means: Voyelle neutre, de son /ə/ en API, intercalée sans signification phonologique et parfois de manière facultative entre deux consonnes.
How do you pronounce "schwa"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "schwa" is \ʃva\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "schwa" come from?
"schwa" is a French word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Nearby French words

Other entries that begin with the letter S in our French index:

Explore PlainSpell

Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Frequency data from Wordfreq. Misspellings derived from Hunspell dictionaries.