ébène

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for ébène is 5 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \e.bɛn\. Corpus data places it at rank #30,435 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Nom habituellement donné au bois de divers arbres de la famille des Ebenaceae (Ébénacées) du genre Diospyros nommés ébénier et certains plaqueminiers au bois sombre. On trouve aussi un arbre de la ...".

Our generated misspelling index lists 7 likely wrong-spelling variants for ébène, with forms such as "béène", "ebene", and "ébbène". 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 13 confusable-pair relationships, "épée", "even", "eine", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.

Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct French form is ébène, spelled É-B-È-N-E.