cardinal
Letters
8 characters
Frequency Rank
#3,985
in French word usage
Misspellings
12
tracked variants
Confusables
7
similar word pairs
cardinal is anFrenchadj. It means: Qui est principal, essentiel. Pronounced \kaʁ.di.nal\. It ranks #3,985 in French word frequency. Often confused with carina and cordial.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cardinal |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | \kaʁ.di.nal\ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #3,985 |
| Misspellings tracked | 12 |
| Confusable pairs | 7 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for cardinal is 8 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \kaʁ.di.nal\. Corpus data places it at rank #3,985 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for cardinal, with forms such as "acrdinal", "cadrinal", and "carddinal". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 7 confusable-pair relationships, "carina", "cordial", "cardinaux", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct French form is cardinal, spelled C-A-R-D-I-N-A-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Qui est principal, essentiel.
- 2Qualifie les quatre points de l’horizon auxquels on rapporte généralement tous les autres points, et qui sont le nord, le sud, l’est et l’ouest.
- 3Qualifie les signes astrologiques qui déterminent les quatre saisons.
- 4Identifie les éléments remarquables de la charnière bivalve.
- 5Désigne les voyelles de référence permettant de situer toutes les autres voyelles les unes par rapport aux autres. → voir voyelle cardinale
- 6Qui est principal, essentiel.
- 7Qui indique la quantité, par opposition à un nombre ordinal qui indique la position, l’ordre, le rang. → voir nombre cardinal
- 8Qualifie les noms ou les adjectifs qui indiquent la quantité.
- 9Qualifie les veines du corps de l’embryon. → voir veine cardinale
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: acrdinal,cadrinal,carddinal,cardianl,cardinall,cardinla,cardinnal,cardnial,caridnal,carrdinal,ccardinal,cradinal
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for cardinal
Misspelling Variants of "cardinal"
Frequency rank: #3,985 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our French index: