UV
\y.ve\
The verdict
“UV” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #17,301) as an adjective. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #17,301
- frequency rank, French
- 456
- “U” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Ultraviolet.
Corpus desk
Index FR-uv · UV · French
UV · rank #17,301 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #17,301
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 456
- PHOTO-FINISH utilisable
Nearest frequency peer: utilisable (-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.
Frequency neighbours of confusable “UV”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- urban
urban
82,703 corpus weight
- urbanisation
urbanisation
82,702 corpus weight
- utilisable
utilisable
82,701 corpus weight
- UV
UV
82,700 corpus weight
- variant
variant
82,699 corpus weight
- Vendôme
Vendôme
82,698 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “UV” against nearest ranked French headwords, not a reprint of the confusable-pair desk.
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 | UV |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| IPA | \y.ve\ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #17,301 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Où “UV” se place dans la fréquence du français
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for UV is neighbouring look-alikes ("ux", "œuvre", …), not just typos; it is anadjective pronounced \y.ve\. Frequency #17,301 among 456 “U” headwords. Gloss: "Ultraviolet.".
Zero misspellings are on record for UV in our index, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ux", "œuvre", "U", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct French form is UV, spelled U-V.
Definition
- 1Ultraviolet.
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.