sur place
\syʁ plas\
The verdict
“sur place” is uncommon French (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adverb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - À l’endroit même.
Corpus desk
Index FR-sur-place · sur place · French
sur place · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
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.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sur place |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adverb |
| IPA | \syʁ plas\ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « sur place » en français
Rare enough to double-check
sur place is uncommon French outside the top frequency list, classed as anadverb, transcribed \syʁ plas\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for sur place, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct French form is sur place, spelled S-U-R- -P-L-A-C-E.
Definition
- 1À l’endroit même.
- 2Sans progresser, sans voir sa situation s’améliorer. → voir surplace.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how sur place appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Si, d’aventure, il restait sur place, attendant une vacance à l’usine, il travaillait à la mine et était payé par pipe de minerai extraite.
En 1798, récolte de froment très nette et abondante, et la même année, sur un hersage, navets consommés sur place par mes troupeaux en octobre; […].
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.