sous
Letters
4 characters
Frequency Rank
#115
in French word usage
Misspellings
5
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
sous is aFrenchprep. It means: Sert à marquer la situation d’une chose à l’égard d’une autre qui est au-dessus, par-dessus, qui la couvre en totalité ou en partie. Pronounced \su\. It ranks #115 in French word frequency. Often confused with su and ss.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sous |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Prep |
| IPA | \su\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #115 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for sous is 4 letters long, classified as aprep, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \su\. Corpus data places it at rank #115 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 12 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 sous, with forms such as "osus", "sosu", and "souss". 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, "su", "ss", "sur", 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 sous, spelled S-O-U-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Sert à marquer la situation d’une chose à l’égard d’une autre qui est au-dessus, par-dessus, qui la couvre en totalité ou en partie.
- 2Dans.
- 3Marque la situation d’un lieu par rapport à un autre plus élevé ou en amont, s’ils sont au bord d’une rivière.
- 4Marque la subordination ou la dépendance.
- 5Se dit de ce qui recouvre, de ce qui cache.
- 6Moyennant, avec.
- 7Indique la cause.
- 8Marque le temps durant lequel un souverain a régné, un gouvernement, un régime a duré, etc.
- 9Avec.
- 10Sous l’emprise ou l’empire de.
- 11Sert à marquer l'infériorité de quelque chose, de quelqu'un par rapport à une référence
- 12Cette recherche explique la sous-évaluation des entreprises de la "nouvelle économie" lors de leur introduction en bourse (IPO) et leur sous-performance boursière ultérieure. — (Samer Saade, Sous-évaluation et sous-performance des introductions en bourse des entreprises de la "nouvelle économie", Éd. Atelier de reproduction des thèses, 2013)
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: osus,sosu,souss,ssous,suos
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for sous
Misspelling Variants of "sous"
Frequency rank: #115 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our French index: