staff

/\staf\/ noun

Letters

5 characters

Frequency Rank

#8,463

in French word usage

Misspellings

6

tracked variants

Confusables

20

similar word pairs

staff is aFrenchnoun. It means: Plâtre adjuvanté de glycérine ou autre liant et armé de toile de jute ou de tissu de verre. Pronounced \staf\. It ranks #8,463 in French word frequency. Often confused with Star and stan.

Key facts for staff
PropertyValue
Headwordstaff
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\staf\
Letters5
Frequency rank#8,463
Misspellings tracked6
Confusable pairs20
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

Position of staff in French word frequency (lower rank = more common)

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for staff is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \staf\. Corpus data places it at rank #8,463 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Plâtre adjuvanté de glycérine ou autre liant et armé de toile de jute ou de tissu de verre.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for staff, with forms such as "satff", "sstaff", and "staf". 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, "Star", "stan", "stat", 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 staff, spelled S-T-A-F-F, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Plâtre adjuvanté de glycérine ou autre liant et armé de toile de jute ou de tissu de verre.

Synonyms

This word in other languages

Common misspellings

Also misspelled as: satff,sstaff,staf,stfaf,sttaff,tsaff

Misspelling Pattern Breakdown

Relative frequency of common misspelling types for staff

Misspelling Variants of "staff"

satff5sstaff6staf4stfaf5sttaff6tsaff5
Misspelling Variants of "staff"

Frequency rank: #8,463 in French

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "staff"?
"staff" is spelled S-T-A-F-F. The IPA pronunciation is \staf\.
What does "staff" mean?
As a noun, "staff" means: Plâtre adjuvanté de glycérine ou autre liant et armé de toile de jute ou de tissu de verre.
What words are commonly confused with "staff"?
"staff" is commonly confused with "Star", "stan", "stat". These words look or sound similar but have different meanings. PlainSpell provides detailed comparisons for each pair.
How do you pronounce "staff"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "staff" is \staf\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "staff" come from?
"staff" 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.