zèle
Letters
4 characters
Frequency Rank
#16,781
in French word usage
Misspellings
6
tracked variants
Confusables
14
similar word pairs
zèle is aFrenchnoun. It means: Vive ardeur pour appliquer les consignes et les règlements à la lettre, ou plus généralement pour le maintien ou le succès de quelque chose en poussant à l’extrême le travail sans prendre la moindr... Pronounced \zɛl\. Often confused with zen and zoé.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | zèle |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \zɛl\ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #16,781 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 14 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for zèle is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \zɛl\. Corpus data places it at rank #16,781 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our generated misspelling index lists 6 likely wrong-spelling variants for zèle, with forms such as "zele", "zlèe", and "zzèle". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 14 confusable-pair relationships, "zen", "zoé", "ZEP", 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 zèle, spelled Z-È-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Vive ardeur pour appliquer les consignes et les règlements à la lettre, ou plus généralement pour le maintien ou le succès de quelque chose en poussant à l’extrême le travail sans prendre la moindre initiative pour l’alléger en l’interprétant.
- 2Ardeur religieuse.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: zele,zlèe,zzèle,zèel,zèlle,èzle
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for zèle
Misspelling Variants of "zèle"
Frequency rank: #16,781 in French
Frequently Asked Questions
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Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter Z in our French index: