étouffer
Letters
8 characters
Frequency Rank
#11,331
in French word usage
Misspellings
10
tracked variants
Confusables
5
similar word pairs
étouffer is aFrenchverb. It means: Faire mourir en arrêtant la respiration. Pronounced \e.tu.fe\. Often confused with étoffe and étouffe.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | étouffer |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \e.tu.fe\ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #11,331 |
| Misspellings tracked | 10 |
| Confusable pairs | 5 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for étouffer is 8 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \e.tu.fe\. Corpus data places it at rank #11,331 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 9 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 étouffer, with forms such as "etouffer", "téouffer", and "éotuffer". 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 5 confusable-pair relationships, "étoffe", "étouffe", "étoffer", 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 étouffer, spelled É-T-O-U-F-F-E-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Faire mourir en arrêtant la respiration.
- 2Suffoquer, empêcher de respirer librement.
- 3Avoir la respiration empêchée ou mourir faute d’air.
- 4Dérober aux plantes l’air ou les nutriments nécessaires à leur végétation.
- 5Éteindre en interceptant l’air.
- 6Supprimer ; annihiler ; empêcher de se développer ; cacher ; surmonter.
- 7Amortir le son.
- 8Empêcher l’apparition publique.
- 9Escamoter, faire disparaître.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: etouffer,téouffer,éotuffer,étofufer,étoufefr,étoufer,étoufferr,étouffre,éttouffer,étuoffer
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for étouffer
Misspelling Variants of "étouffer"
Frequency rank: #11,331 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter É in our French index: