il
\il\
The verdict
“il” is in the everyday core of French, ranked #18 in French word frequency and used as a pronoun.
- #18
- frequency rank, French
- 2
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Pronom de la troisième personne du singulier masculin (utilisé exclusivement en tant que sujet). Désigne une personne, un animal ou une chose dont le genre est masculin.
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 | il |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Pronoun |
| IPA | \il\ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #18 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “il” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for il is 2 letters long, classified as a pronoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \il\. Corpus data places it at rank #18 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Pronom de la troisième personne du singulier masculin (utilisé exclusivement en tant que sujet). Désigne une personne, un animal ou une chose dont le genre est masculin.".
No misspelling variants are generated for il in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "it", "IP", "ix", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct French form is il, spelled I-L.
Definition
- 1Pronom de la troisième personne du singulier masculin (utilisé exclusivement en tant que sujet). Désigne une personne, un animal ou une chose dont le genre est masculin.
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 “il”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is I-L - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \il\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “it” - see the side-by-side comparison. il vs it
- 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.