cela
Letters
4 characters
Frequency Rank
#150
in French word usage
Misspellings
5
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
cela is aFrenchpron. It means: Cette chose-là, par opposition à cette chose-ci. — Note d’usage : Pronom démonstratif neutre permettant de remplacer un objet distant (ou un être vivant dont on ignore la nature). En revanche (à l’... Pronounced \sə.la\. It ranks #150 in French word frequency. Often confused with Cl and ces.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cela |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Pron |
| IPA | \sə.la\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #150 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for cela is 4 letters long, classified as apron, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \sə.la\. Corpus data places it at rank #150 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for cela, with forms such as "ccela", "ceal", and "cella". 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 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Cl", "ces", "cet", 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 cela, spelled C-E-L-A, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Cette chose-là, par opposition à cette chose-ci. — Note d’usage : Pronom démonstratif neutre permettant de remplacer un objet distant (ou un être vivant dont on ignore la nature). En revanche (à l’inverse du pronom ceci), il ne remplace jamais une personne.
- 2Cette chose, cette situation. — Note d’usage : Sans opposition à ceci. On utilise ce devant le verbe être, et plus souvent ça dans les autres cas à l’oral.
- 3Ce qui vient d'être dit.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccela,ceal,cella,clea,ecla
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for cela
Misspelling Variants of "cela"
Frequency rank: #150 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our French index: