humour

/\y.muʁ\/ noun

Letters

6 characters

Frequency Rank

#2,179

in French word usage

Misspellings

8

tracked variants

Confusables

5

similar word pairs

humour is aFrenchnoun. It means: Forme d’ironie à la fois plaisante et sérieuse, sentimentale et satirique. Pronounced \y.muʁ\. It ranks #2,179 in French word frequency. Often confused with humus and hour.

Key facts for humour
PropertyValue
Headwordhumour
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\y.muʁ\
Letters6
Frequency rank#2,179
Misspellings tracked8
Confusable pairs5
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

Position of humour in French word frequency (lower rank = more common)

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for humour is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \y.muʁ\. Corpus data places it at rank #2,179 in overall French word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Forme d’ironie à la fois plaisante et sérieuse, sentimentale et satirique.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for humour, with forms such as "hhumour", "hmuour", and "hummour". 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, "humus", "hour", "humeur", 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 humour, spelled H-U-M-O-U-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Forme d’ironie à la fois plaisante et sérieuse, sentimentale et satirique.

Synonyms

This word in other languages

Common misspellings

Also misspelled as: hhumour,hmuour,hummour,humoru,humourr,humuor,huomur,uhmour

Misspelling Pattern Breakdown

Relative frequency of common misspelling types for humour

Misspelling Variants of "humour"

hhumour7hmuour6hummour7humoru6humourr7humuor6huomur6uhmour6
Misspelling Variants of "humour"

Frequency rank: #2,179 in French

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "humour"?
"humour" is spelled H-U-M-O-U-R. The IPA pronunciation is \y.muʁ\.
What does "humour" mean?
As a noun, "humour" means: Forme d’ironie à la fois plaisante et sérieuse, sentimentale et satirique.
What words are commonly confused with "humour"?
"humour" is commonly confused with "humus", "hour", "humeur". These words look or sound similar but have different meanings. PlainSpell provides detailed comparisons for each pair.
How do you pronounce "humour"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "humour" is \y.muʁ\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "humour" come from?
"humour" is a French word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Nearby French words

Other entries that begin with the letter H in our French index:

Explore PlainSpell

Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Frequency data from Wordfreq. Misspellings derived from Hunspell dictionaries.