oil
The verdict
“oil” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #15,699) as an adverb. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #15,699
- frequency rank, French
- 1,642
- “O” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Oui.
Corpus desk
Index FR-oil · oil · French
oil · rank #15,699 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #15,699
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 1,642
- PHOTO-FINISH octave
Nearest frequency peer: octave (-1 rank slots)
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Voisins de fréquence du confusable « oil »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- Nicholas
Nicholas
84,306 corpus weight
- ocean
ocean
84,304 corpus weight
- octave
octave
84,303 corpus weight
- oil
oil
84,302 corpus weight
- oranges
oranges
84,300 corpus weight
- ordonner
ordonner
84,299 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « oil » face aux lemmes français les plus proches par rang, pas un reprint du bureau des confusables.
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 | oil |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adverb |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #15,699 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « oil »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for oil is neighbouring look-alikes ("on", "ou", …), not just typos; it is anadverb. Frequency #15,699 among 1,642 “O” headwords. Gloss: "Oui.".
oil doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "on", "ou", "or", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, so its spelling pattern is best understood through pronunciation rather than a traceable origin. The correct French form is oil, spelled O-I-L.
Definition
- 1Oui.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how oil appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
& cil me respont si m’ait Deus oil
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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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "oil", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).