they
Letters
4 characters
Frequency Rank
#13,279
in French word usage
Misspellings
6
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
they is aFrenchpron. It means: Pronom personnel sujet de la troisième personne du pluriel ; ils, elles, iels. Pronounced \ðeɪ\. Often confused with ty and tué.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | they |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Pron |
| IPA | \ðeɪ\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #13,279 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for they is 4 letters long, classified as apron, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ðeɪ\. Corpus data places it at rank #13,279 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for they, with forms such as "htey", "tehy", and "theyy". 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, "ty", "tué", "tre", 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 they, spelled T-H-E-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Pronom personnel sujet de la troisième personne du pluriel ; ils, elles, iels.
- 2Pronom personnel utilisé pour parler des gens en général, excluant le locuteur ; on, ils.
- 3Pronom personnel utilisé pour parler des gens en général, excluant le locuteur ; on, ils.
- 4Pronom personnel sujet de la troisième personne du singulier utilisé pour parler d’une personne de genre inconnu ; il ou elle, iel, cette personne.
- 5Pronom personnel sujet de la troisième personne du singulier utilisé pour parler d’une personne de genre inconnu ; il ou elle, iel, cette personne.
- 6Pronom personnel sujet de la troisième personne du singulier utilisé pour parler d’une personne de genre inconnu ; il ou elle, iel, cette personne.
- 7Pronom personnel sujet de la troisième personne du singulier utilisé pour parler d’une personne non-binaire ; iel, ael, al.
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: htey,tehy,theyy,thhey,thye,tthey
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for they
Misspelling Variants of "they"
Frequency rank: #13,279 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter T in our French index: