café

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for café is 4 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌkæˈfeɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #10,342 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 5 likely wrong-spelling variants for café, with forms such as "acfé", "caffé", and "caéf". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "CE", "can", "car", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Unadapted borrowing from French café (“coffee; coffee shop”). Doublet of caffè and coffee. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is café, spelled C-A-F-É, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.