calembours
\ka.lɑ̃.buʁ\
The verdict
“calembours” is uncommon French (frequency #62,118 among 8,609 “C” headwords), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #62,118
- frequency rank, French
- 8,609
- “C” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Pluriel de calembour.
Corpus desk
Index FR-calembours · calembours · French
calembours · rank #62,118 · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-RARE #62,118
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 8,609
- PHOTO-FINISH calmar
Nearest frequency peer: calmar (+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.
Rangs de longue queue près de « calembours »
Bande clairsemée: les barres inversent le rang pour que le rare se lise plus court
- broadcasting
broadcasting
37,888 corpus weight
- Béchar
Béchar
37,886 corpus weight
- calembours
calembours
37,883 corpus weight
- calmar
calmar
37,882 corpus weight
- calquer
calquer
37,881 corpus weight
- calumet
calumet
37,880 corpus weight
What this shows Vue de longue queue: où « calembours » se situe face à des rangs français aussi rares.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | calembours |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ka.lɑ̃.buʁ\ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Frequency rank | #62,118 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « calembours » en français
Rare enough to double-check
calembours is uncommon French at frequency #62,118 among 8,609 “C” headwords, classed as anoun, transcribed \ka.lɑ̃.buʁ\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Pluriel de calembour.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for calembours, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No explicit etymology string is stored 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 calembours, spelled C-A-L-E-M-B-O-U-R-S.
Definition
- 1Pluriel de calembour.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how calembours appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
De la même façon, l’écriture rushdienne transcrit la langue de S.S. Sisodia et la « brissétise », en recourant en permanence sur la décomposition des syntagmes pour en exploiter les ambiguïtés et les calembours jaillissant de l’homophonie.
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 "calembours", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 10 letters (nearest by frequency rank).