ste
\ˈstɛ\
The verdict
“ste” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #10,412) as a verb. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #10,412
- frequency rank, French
- 6,032
- “S” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Troisième personne du singulier du passé simple de stare.
Corpus desk
Index FR-ste · ste · French
ste · rank #10,412 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #10,412
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,032
- PHOTO-FINISH sourd
Nearest frequency peer: sourd (-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 « ste »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- soul
soul
89,592 corpus weight
- sourcils
sourcils
89,591 corpus weight
- sourd
sourd
89,590 corpus weight
- ste
ste
89,589 corpus weight
- sub
sub
89,588 corpus weight
- successives
successives
89,587 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « ste » 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 | ste |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \ˈstɛ\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #10,412 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « ste »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for ste is neighbouring look-alikes ("su", "sy", …), not just typos; it is averb pronounced \ˈstɛ\. Frequency #10,412 among 6,032 “S” headwords. Gloss: "Troisième personne du singulier du passé simple de stare.".
ste has no tracked misspelling variants, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "su", "sy", "SV", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct French form is ste, spelled S-T-E.
Definition
- 1Troisième personne du singulier du passé simple de stare.
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 "ste", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).