sil
\sil\
The verdict
“sil” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #20,575) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #20,575
- frequency rank, French
- 6,032
- “S” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Argile, variété d’ocre, dont les Anciens faisaient des poteries rouges ou jaunes.
Corpus desk
Index FR-sil · sil · French
sil · rank #20,575 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #20,575
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 6,032
- PHOTO-FINISH Shane
Nearest frequency peer: Shane (-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 « sil »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- semelle
semelle
79,429 corpus weight
- servitude
servitude
79,428 corpus weight
- Shane
Shane
79,427 corpus weight
- sil
sil
79,426 corpus weight
- skin
skin
79,425 corpus weight
- sorts
sorts
79,424 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « sil » 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 | sil |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \sil\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #20,575 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « sil »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for sil is neighbouring look-alikes ("st", "su", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \sil\. Frequency #20,575 among 6,032 “S” headwords. Gloss: "Argile, variété d’ocre, dont les Anciens faisaient des poteries rouges ou jaunes.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for sil, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "st", "su", "so", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is sil, spelled S-I-L.
Definition
- 1Argile, variété d’ocre, dont les Anciens faisaient des poteries rouges ou jaunes.
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 "sil", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).