Ambiance or ambience?
ambiance is a noun meaning “A particular mood or atmosphere of an environment or surrounding influence”; ambience is a noun meaning “Alternative spelling of ambiance”. Wiktionary gives them as spellings of the same word. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) ambience is about 1.8 times as common as ambiance.
What is the difference between ambiance and ambience?
| ambiance | ambience | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | noun | noun |
| Meaning | A particular mood or atmosphere of an environment or surrounding influence Of a three-dimensional model, a secondary color of a polygon that becomes more pronounced with shading | Alternative spelling of ambiance |
| Example | none recorded | none recorded |
| Forms | ambiances | ambiences |
| Pronunciation | /ˈɒm.bi.ɒns/ /ˈæm.bi.əns/ /ˈɑm.bi.ɑns/ | /ˈæm.bi.əns/ /ɑ-/ |
| In writing | about once in every 2 million words | about once in every 1 million words |
Sources: ambiance and ambience in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of ambiance and ambience
ambiance
- 1
A particular mood or atmosphere of an environment or surrounding influence
- 2
Of a three-dimensional model, a secondary color of a polygon that becomes more pronounced with shading
ambience
- 1
Alternative spelling of ambiance
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, ambiance or ambience?
ambiance appears about once in every 2 million words; ambience about once in every 1 million words.
ambiance about once in every 2 million wordsambience about once in every 1 million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search ambiance vs ambience?
“ambiance vs ambience” is searched about 4,400 times a month on Google and 80 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“ambience vs ambiance”, “ambiance or ambience”).
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.