whoa
\wəʊ\
The verdict
“whoa” is uncommon French (frequency #59,724 among 549 “W” headwords), classed as an interjection. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- #59,724
- frequency rank, French
- 549
- “W” headwords
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Ho, stop (en s’adressant à un cheval), doucement, ralentis. Interjection destinée à faire arrêter un cheval.
Corpus desk
Index FR-whoa · whoa · French
whoa · rank #59,724 · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-RARE #59,724
- LEN-MID 4 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 549
- PHOTO-FINISH Wiesbaden
Nearest frequency peer: Wiesbaden (+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.
Rangs de longue queue près de « whoa »
Bande clairsemée: les barres inversent le rang pour que le rare se lise plus court
- wahhabisme
wahhabisme
40,279 corpus weight
- whoa
whoa
40,277 corpus weight
- Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
40,276 corpus weight
- wildlife
wildlife
40,275 corpus weight
- woh
woh
40,274 corpus weight
- writer
writer
40,273 corpus weight
What this shows Vue de longue queue: où « whoa » se situe face à des rangs français aussi rares.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | whoa |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Interjection |
| IPA | \wəʊ\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #59,724 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « whoa » en français
Rare enough to double-check
whoa is uncommon French at frequency #59,724 among 549 “W” headwords, classed as aninterjection, transcribed \wəʊ\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for whoa, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, which typically means the spelling is too distinctive to be mistaken for another word.
This entry's etymology isn't recorded, 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 whoa, spelled W-H-O-A.
Definition
- 1Ho, stop (en s’adressant à un cheval), doucement, ralentis. Interjection destinée à faire arrêter un cheval.
- 2Ouah.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how whoa appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Whoa, Nelly!
Whoa, are you serious?
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 "whoa", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 4 letters (nearest by frequency rank).