subtil
Letters
6 characters
Frequency Rank
#12,069
in French word usage
Misspellings
9
tracked variants
Confusables
8
similar word pairs
subtil is anFrenchadj. It means: Qui est délié, fin, menu. Pronounced \syp.til\. Often confused with subtile and subtils.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | subtil |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adj |
| IPA | \syp.til\ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #12,069 |
| Misspellings tracked | 9 |
| Confusable pairs | 8 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for subtil is 6 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \syp.til\. Corpus data places it at rank #12,069 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 7 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 9 documented wrong-spelling variants for subtil, with forms such as "sbutil", "ssubtil", and "subbtil". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 8 confusable-pair relationships, "subtile", "subtils", "subtiles", 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 subtil, spelled S-U-B-T-I-L, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Qui est délié, fin, menu.
- 2Qualifie les choses qui sont de nature à pénétrer, à s’insinuer promptement.
- 3Qui perçoit finement, avec acuité, qui distingue les choses les plus fines à saisir.
- 4Qui manifeste de la finesse, de l’ingéniosité, de la pénétration.
- 5Qui est trop raffiné, qui échappe à l’intelligence par un excès de finesse.
- 6Difficile à percevoir ou comprendre en raison de sa finesse ou de sa complexité.
- 7Intangible, immatériel, spirituel, astral, éthérique.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: sbutil,ssubtil,subbtil,subitl,subtill,subtli,subttil,sutbil,usbtil
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for subtil
Misspelling Variants of "subtil"
Frequency rank: #12,069 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our French index: