cal
The verdict
“cal” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #17,892) as a symbol. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #17,892
- frequency rank, French
- 8,609
- “C” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Symbole de la calorie, unité de mesure d’énergie.
Corpus desk
Index FR-cal · cal · French
cal · rank #17,892 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #17,892
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 8,609
- PHOTO-FINISH cadran
Nearest frequency peer: cadran (-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.
Voisins de fréquence du confusable « cal »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- brunet
brunet
82,112 corpus weight
- bénévolat
bénévolat
82,111 corpus weight
- cadran
cadran
82,110 corpus weight
- cal
cal
82,109 corpus weight
- caractérise…
caractérisent
82,108 corpus weight
- carburants
carburants
82,107 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « cal » face aux lemmes français les plus proches par rang, pas un reprint du bureau des confusables.
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 | cal |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Symbol |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #17,892 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « cal »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for cal is neighbouring look-alikes ("ce", "ci", …), not just typos; it is asymbol. Frequency #17,892 among 8,609 “C” headwords. Gloss: "Symbole de la calorie, unité de mesure d’énergie.".
No generated misspelling entries exist for cal in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ce", "ci", "co", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so its spelling is easiest explained by how it's pronounced rather than where it came from. The correct French form is cal, spelled C-A-L.
Definition
- 1Symbole de la calorie, unité de mesure d’énergie.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how cal appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
1 cal_(IT) = 4,1868 J (exactement)
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "cal", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).