drone
\dʁon\
The verdict
“drone” is a regularly-used French word, ranked #9,472 in French word frequency and used as a noun.
- #9,472
- frequency rank, French
- 5
- letters
- 7
- tracked misspellings
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Engin mobile terrestre, aérien, naval ou spatial, sans équipage embarqué, programmé ou télécommandé, et qui peut être réutilisé.
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 | drone |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \dʁon\ |
| Letters | 5 |
| Frequency rank | #9,472 |
| Misspellings tracked | 7 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “drone” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for drone is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \dʁon\. Corpus data places it at rank #9,472 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for drone, with forms such as "ddrone", "dorne", and "drnoe". Every one of these variants traces to a single-character edit -- an added or dropped letter, a swapped consonant, or a vowel swap -- the kind of slip a spell-checker is built to catch. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "drop", "drunk", "drones", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is drone, spelled D-R-O-N-E.
Definition
- 1Engin mobile terrestre, aérien, naval ou spatial, sans équipage embarqué, programmé ou télécommandé, et qui peut être réutilisé.
- 2Engin mobile terrestre, aérien, naval ou spatial, sans équipage embarqué, programmé ou télécommandé, et qui peut être réutilisé.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ddrone,dorne,drnoe,droen,dronne,drrone,rdone
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
How far each generated variant is from the correct spelling of drone - counted as single-character edits (an insertion, a deletion, or a substituted letter). The larger the bar, the easier the typo is to spot; one-edit slips are the ones that sneak past readers.
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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Using “drone”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is D-R-O-N-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \dʁon\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “drop” - see the side-by-side comparison. drone vs drop
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.