ou
Letters
2 characters
Frequency Rank
#45
in French word usage
Misspellings
0
tracked variants
Confusables
20
similar word pairs
ou is aFrenchconj. It means: Indique une disjonction inclusive sur plusieurs concepts quand la cohabitation des concepts est envisageable : un ou plus dans la liste sont envisageables à la fois. Pronounced \u\. It ranks #45 in French word frequency. Often confused with ow and ox.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | ou |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Conj |
| IPA | \u\ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #45 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for ou is 2 letters long, classified as aconj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \u\. Corpus data places it at rank #45 in overall French word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for ou in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ow", "ox", "oy", 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 ou, spelled O-U, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Indique une disjonction inclusive sur plusieurs concepts quand la cohabitation des concepts est envisageable : un ou plus dans la liste sont envisageables à la fois.
- 2Indique une disjonction exclusive : un seul dans la liste est envisageable à la fois. Quand le sujet comprend un ou de ce sens, le verbe s’accorde en nombre avec la dernière option. La première option peut être précédée par soit ou ou.
- 3Indique une expression alternative de la même chose.
- 4Indique le sous-titre d’un livre.
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #45 in French
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter O in our French index: