jail

/\dʒeɪl\/ noun

Letters

4 characters

Frequency Rank

#68,380

in French word usage

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

jail is aFrenchnoun. It means: Geôle, prison. Pronounced \dʒeɪl\.

Key facts for jail
PropertyValue
Headwordjail
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\dʒeɪl\
Letters4
Frequency rank#68,380
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

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

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for jail is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \dʒeɪl\. Corpus data places it at rank #68,380 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Geôle, prison.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for jail in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

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 jail, spelled J-A-I-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Geôle, prison.

Frequency rank: #68,380 in French

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "jail"?
"jail" is spelled J-A-I-L. The IPA pronunciation is \dʒeɪl\.
What does "jail" mean?
As a noun, "jail" means: Geôle, prison.
How do you pronounce "jail"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "jail" is \dʒeɪl\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "jail" come from?
"jail" 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 J 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.