tom
\tɔm\
The verdict
“tom” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #2,600) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #2,600
- frequency rank, French
- 3,703
- “T” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Abréviation courante de tom-tom (instrument de percussion).
Corpus desk
Index FR-tom · tom · French
tom · rank #2,600 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #2,600
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 3,703
- PHOTO-FINISH touché
Nearest frequency peer: touché (+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 « tom »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- spécialiste
spécialiste
97,404 corpus weight
- stage
stage
97,403 corpus weight
- tom
tom
97,401 corpus weight
- touché
touché
97,400 corpus weight
- USA
USA
97,399 corpus weight
- vivent
vivent
97,398 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « tom » 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 | tom |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \tɔm\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #2,600 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « tom »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for tom is neighbouring look-alikes ("tu", "TV", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \tɔm\. Frequency #2,600 among 3,703 “T” headwords. Gloss: "Abréviation courante de tom-tom (instrument de percussion).".
No generated misspelling entries exist for tom in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "tu", "TV", "TS", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct French form is tom, spelled T-O-M.
Definition
- 1Abréviation courante de tom-tom (instrument de percussion).
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how tom appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Ton tom aigu n'est pas assez tendu.
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 "tom", not the corpus desk frequency band.