adobevsAdourWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: adobe is a noun, Adour is a name, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“adobe” is a noun and “Adour” is a name - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#26,947
“adobe” frequency rank
#33,101
“Adour” frequency rank
60048
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature adobe Adour
Definition Brique durcie au soleil, fabriquée à partir de terre argileuse mélangée à de la paille ou de l’herbe sèche hachée. Fleuve du bassin aquitain, d’une longueur de 335 km, qui prend sa source dans les Pyrénées et se jette dans l'Atlantique entre Tarnos et Anglet.

Where the eye mixes adobe and Adour

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 3 letters in sequence.

5 ch
adobe
5 ch
Adour

Why the eye confuses adobe with Adour

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: adobe is \a.dɔb\ while Adour is \a.duʁ\. 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 (noun vs name), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 60048, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

adobe is recorded at frequency rank #26,947, classified as anoun, pronounced \a.dɔb\. Adour is at rank #33,101, tagged as aname, pronounced \a.duʁ\.

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 60048, this pair ranks #99,745 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of adobe vs Adour

Shared letters: ado. Private to "adobe": be. Private to "Adour": ru.

"adobe" · 5 letters · shape VCVCV  ·  "Adour" · 5 letters · shape VCVVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • adobeadboe · addobe · adobbe · adoeb · aodbe · daobe
  • Adouraddour · adoru · adourr · aduor · aodur · daour

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "adobe" and "Adour" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "adobe" is a noun and "Adour" a name, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary French text, does "adobe" or "Adour" show up more?
"adobe" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #26,947 in our French list, against #33,101 for "Adour". 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 "adobe" and "Adour" is sorted above. Next: full entries or other pairs that share a letter shape.

  • Full dictionary entry for "adobe" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "Adour" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #99,745 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "adobe" and "Adour" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "Adour vs aur". 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 #99,745 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