sniff
\snif\
The verdict
“sniff” is uncommon French (frequency #61,151 among 6,032 “S” headwords), classed as an onomatopoeia. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #61,151
- frequency rank, French
- 6,032
- “S” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Bruit de reniflement.
Corpus desk
Index FR-sniff · sniff · French
sniff · rank #61,151 · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-RARE #61,151
- LEN-MID 5 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,032
- PHOTO-FINISH skater
Nearest frequency peer: skater (-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.
Rangs de longue queue près de « sniff »
Bande clairsemée: les barres inversent le rang pour que le rare se lise plus court
- SIRET
SIRET
38,853 corpus weight
- situaient
situaient
38,852 corpus weight
- skater
skater
38,851 corpus weight
- sniff
sniff
38,850 corpus weight
- solano
solano
38,849 corpus weight
- soldées
soldées
38,848 corpus weight
What this shows Vue de longue queue: où « sniff » se situe face à des rangs français aussi rares.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sniff |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Onomatopoeia |
| IPA | \snif\ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #61,151 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « sniff » en français
Rare enough to double-check
sniff is uncommon French at frequency #61,151 among 6,032 “S” headwords, classed as anonomatopoeia, transcribed \snif\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Bruit de reniflement.".
Zero misspellings are on record for sniff in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No documented word history exists for this headword, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is sniff, spelled S-N-I-F-F.
Definition
- 1Bruit de reniflement.
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 "sniff", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 5 letters (nearest by frequency rank).