adaptevsadoptéWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: adapte is a verb, adopté is an adjective, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“adapte” is a verb and “adopté” is an adjective - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#10,269
“adapte” frequency rank
#3,121
“adopté” frequency rank
13390
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature adapte adopté
Definition Première personne du singulier de l’indicatif présent du verbe adapter. Qui est légalement adopté.

Where the eye mixes adapte and adopté

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 4 letters in sequence.

6 ch
adapte
6 ch
adopté

Look-alike desk: adapte vs adopté

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: adapte is \a.dapt\ while adopté is \a.dɔp.te\. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions, and the parts of speech differ too (verb vs adjective), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 13390, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

adapte is recorded at frequency rank #10,269, classified as averb, pronounced \a.dapt\. adopté is at rank #3,121, tagged as anadj, pronounced \a.dɔp.te\.

Glosses for this pair are partially populated in our dataset, but the full side-by-side definitions above should still guide you to the right choice.

With a confusion score of 13390, this pair ranks #401,209 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of adapte vs adopté

Shared letters: adpt. Private to "adapte": e. Private to "adopté": .

"adapte" · 6 letters · shape VCVCCV  ·  "adopté" · 6 letters · shape VCVCCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • adapteaadpte · adapet · adappte · adaptte · adatpe · addapte · adpate · daapte

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "adapte" for "adopté" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "adapte" is a verb and "adopté" an adjective, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary French text, does "adapte" or "adopté" show up more?
"adopté" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #3,121 in our French list, against #10,269 for "adapte". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

Eye-level mix-up between "adapte" and "adopté" is sorted above. Next: full entries or other pairs that share a letter shape.

  • Full dictionary entry for "adapte" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "adopté" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #401,209 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "adapte" and "adopté" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "adopté vs adoptera". Nearby pair
  • Recorded mistypes exist for at least one side of this pair, useful when a spell-checker or OCR lands on the wrong form. See mistypes

Confusion rank #401,209 of 440,172 scored French pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list