Français (French)
A free French word reference: definitions, IPA pronunciation, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections from the open Wiktionary corpus.
French at a glance
PlainSpell indexes 4,485,239 French words with 440,172 confusable pairs and 21,890 homophones; more French words begin with “C” than any other letter, and “après vs autres” is the pair most likely to be confused.
- 4,485,239
- French words
- 440,172
- confusable pairs
- 21,890
- homophones
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 2026). Definitions, IPA pronunciation, etymology and spelling corrections, free.
Where French sits by word inventory
French indexes 4,485,239 headwords among 5 languages (corpus inventory, not a quality ranking). Orthogonal to the letter and length charts below.
French vs all languages by word count
Where this language's indexed vocabulary sits among every PlainSpell language
4,485,239 1st of 5 the highest of 5 languages
Languages, banded by headword inventory
Each bar is a band; taller bars hold more languages. The dashed line + filled bar mark this entry. Hover or tap any bar for its full count and share, and where it sits relative to this entry.
Source Wiktionary (CC BY-SA) via PlainSpell · 2026-09-03
French homophone groups by size
Exclusive cut of 9,139 French homophone groups by member count. Orthogonal to the initial-letter chart and word-length distribution below.
Parcourir A–Z
Which letters start the most French words?
Most common initial letters in French
Top 10 letters, ranked by how many indexed words begin with each
- C
C
8,609 words
- P
P
6,826 words
- A
A
6,727 words
- S
S
6,032 words
- R
R
5,742 words
- D
D
5,307 words
- M
M
5,038 words
- B
B
4,251 words
- T
T
3,703 words
- I
I
3,561 words
How long are French words?
French word lengths
80,263 words by word length (letters); the ranking above is drawn from the right-hand tail
word length (letters) →
What this showsFrench vocabulary clusters around the middle lengths; the very short and very long words are a small minority of the indexed corpus.
Mots les plus fréquents
Paires souvent confondues
- 1aprèsvsautres
- 2avaitvsavoir
- 3encorevsentre
- 4avaitvsavant
- 5ainsivsaussi
- 6commevscompte
- 7étaientvsétait
- 8parcevsParis
- 9parcevspartie
- 10cellevscette
Top 5 paires souvent confondues, en un coup d’œil
Classées par fréquence composite × similarité visuelle. Plus la barre est haute, plus la substitution réelle est probable.
Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) French confusables export · Q2 2026 Confusable scores combine word-frequency rank and Damerau–Levenshtein similarity.
Explore French
Three ways into the corpus from here.
- Look up any French word for its definition, IPA pronunciation, etymology and misspellings. Browse French A–Z
- Settle a confusable pair, which spelling means what, compared side by side. Confusable pairs
- See the cross-language rankings: hardest to spell, most confusable, largest homophone groups. Rankings
Source & data vintage
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) French headword + definitions corpus · Q2 2026 Aggregated and indexed via kaikki.org dictionary export. Confusable pairs are computed; homophone groups are derived from IPA matches.
Every French figure on this page is counted directly from the PlainSpell database. How each field is sourced, derived, and corrected is documented in our methodology and editorial & corrections policy. Spotted an error? Report a correction.