sci
\ˈʃi\
The verdict
“sci” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #17,003) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #17,003
- frequency rank, French
- 6,032
- “S” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Ski, patin très long, légèrement recourbé en avant, qui sert à glisser sur la neige.
Corpus desk
Index FR-sci · sci · French
sci · rank #17,003 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #17,003
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,032
- PHOTO-FINISH scellé
Nearest frequency peer: scellé (-1 rank slots)
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Voisins de fréquence du confusable « sci »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- sauts
sauts
83,001 corpus weight
- scandinaves
scandinaves
83,000 corpus weight
- scellé
scellé
82,999 corpus weight
- sci
sci
82,998 corpus weight
- sembles
sembles
82,997 corpus weight
- signalement
signalement
82,996 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « sci » face aux lemmes français les plus proches par rang, pas un reprint du bureau des confusables.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sci |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ˈʃi\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #17,003 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « sci »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for sci is neighbouring look-alikes ("se", "si", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \ˈʃi\. Frequency #17,003 among 6,032 “S” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for sci, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "se", "si", "st", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is sci, spelled S-C-I.
Definition
- 1Ski, patin très long, légèrement recourbé en avant, qui sert à glisser sur la neige.
- 2Ski, sport de glisse sur neige ou sur eau, pratiqué à l’aide de ces accessoires.
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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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "sci", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).