sterne
\stɛʁn\
The verdict
“sterne” is an uncommon French word, ranked #57,615 in French word frequency and used as a noun.
- #57,615
- frequency rank, French
- 6
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) — Oiseau palmipède migrateur marin de la famille des laridés, communément appelé hirondelle de mer, à tête noire et à dos gris, qui vit sur les côtes ou près de l’eau.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sterne |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \stɛʁn\ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #57,615 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “sterne” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for sterne is 6 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \stɛʁn\. Corpus data places it at rank #57,615 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Oiseau palmipède migrateur marin de la famille des laridés, communément appelé hirondelle de mer, à tête noire et à dos gris, qui vit sur les côtes ou près de l’eau.".
No misspelling variants are generated for sterne in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
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 sterne, spelled S-T-E-R-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Oiseau palmipède migrateur marin de la famille des laridés, communément appelé hirondelle de mer, à tête noire et à dos gris, qui vit sur les côtes ou près de l’eau.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
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.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “sterne, French word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/fr/mot/sterne
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Using “sterne”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is S-T-E-R-N-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \stɛʁn\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our French index: