lay vs le, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“lay” is an adjective and “le” is an article - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#27,500
“lay” frequency rank: #3
“le” frequency rank: 27503
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	lay	le
Definition	Variante de lé.	Ce… dont on parle maintenant. Déterminant marquant un nom masculin singulier, référant à une seule entité possible dans un contexte.

Letter map: lay vs le

Shared letters muted; letters that set lay and le apart highlighted. Shared run: 1.

3 ch

lay

2 ch

Part-of-speech tell for lay / le

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: lay is anadjective and leanarticle. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 27503, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

lay is recorded at frequency rank #27,500, classified as anadj. le is at rank #3, tagged as anarticle, pronounced \lə\.

Glosses for this pair are partially populated in our dataset, but the full side-by-side definitions above should still guide you to the right choice.

With a confusion score of 27503, this pair ranks #328,560 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of lay vs le

Shared letters: l. Private to "lay": ay. Private to "le": e.

"lay" · 3 letters · shape CVV · "le" · 2 letters · shape CV

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "lay" for "le" ever safe?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "lay" is an adjective and "le" an article, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

In ordinary French text, does "lay" or "le" show up more?

"le" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #3 in our French list, against #27,500 for "lay". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "lay" and "le". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "lay" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "le" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #328,560 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"lay" and "le" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "lay vs lep". Nearby pair

Confusion rank #328,560 of 440,172 scored French pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.