oy
\ɔj\
The verdict
“oy” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #41,948) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #41,948
- frequency rank, French
- 1,642
- “O” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Prime.
Corpus desk
Index FR-oy · oy · French
oy · rank #41,948 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #41,948
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 1,642
- PHOTO-FINISH Ouïghours
Nearest frequency peer: Ouïghours (-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 « oy »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- ouille
ouille
58,056 corpus weight
- ouvraient
ouvraient
58,055 corpus weight
- Ouïghours
Ouïghours
58,054 corpus weight
- oy
oy
58,053 corpus weight
- paradigmes
paradigmes
58,052 corpus weight
- passable
passable
58,051 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « oy » 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 | oy |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ɔj\ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #41,948 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « oy »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for oy is neighbouring look-alikes ("oyez", "O", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \ɔj\. Frequency #41,948 among 1,642 “O” headwords. Gloss: "Prime.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for oy, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "oyez", "O", "on", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is best read as a straightforward mapping from sound to letter. The correct French form is oy, spelled O-Y.
Definition
- 1Prime.
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.