contour
Letters
7 characters
Frequency Rank
#16,845
in French word usage
Misspellings
10
tracked variants
Confusables
13
similar word pairs
contour is aFrenchnoun. It means: Limite externe de la surface d’un corps, surtout en parlant des objets arrondis. Pronounced \kɔ̃.tuʁ\. Often confused with contrer and contours.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | contour |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \kɔ̃.tuʁ\ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Frequency rank | #16,845 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 13 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for contour is 7 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \kɔ̃.tuʁ\. Corpus data places it at rank #16,845 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 10 documented wrong-spelling variants for contour, with forms such as "ccontour", "cnotour", and "conntour". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "contrer", "contours", "contourne", 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 contour, spelled C-O-N-T-O-U-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Limite externe de la surface d’un corps, surtout en parlant des objets arrondis.
- 2Silhouette, profil, périmètre, ligne de délinéation.
- 3Enceinte.
- 4Virage.
- 5Trait délimitant une surface.
- 6Trait ou ligne de changement de couleur ou de valeur d'un graphisme, qui en délimite l'ensemble ou des éléments.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccontour,cnotour,conntour,conotur,contoru,contourr,conttour,contuor,cotnour,ocntour
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for contour
Misspelling Variants of "contour"
Frequency rank: #16,845 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our French index: