te
\tə\
The verdict
“te” is in the everyday core of French, ranked #103 in French word frequency and used as a pronoun.
- #103
- frequency rank, French
- 2
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Pronom à la deuxième personne du singulier, utilisé pour désigner celui à qui l’on parle, en tant que complément d’objet direct ou indirect.
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 | te |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Pronoun |
| IPA | \tə\ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #103 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “te” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for te is 2 letters long, classified as a pronoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \tə\. Corpus data places it at rank #103 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language. Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
te has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "tu", "TV", "Tl", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is te, spelled T-E.
Definition
- 1Pronom à la deuxième personne du singulier, utilisé pour désigner celui à qui l’on parle, en tant que complément d’objet direct ou indirect.
- 2Pour intensifier le discours, dans un emploi explétif (datif éthique).
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “te”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is T-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \tə\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “tu” - see the side-by-side comparison. te vs tu
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.