affairevsaffaméeTell them apart

Which to use

“affaire” and “affamée” are a confusable French pair: similar on the page, but distinct in meaning, check the gloss before you choose.

#526
“affaire” frequency rank
#40,585
“affamée” frequency rank
41111
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature affaire affamée
Definition Chose dont on doit s’occuper à faire. Femme affamée.

Where the eye mixes affaire and affamée

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 5 letters in sequence. affaire (VCCVVCV) and affamée (VCCVCVV) run the same length but a different consonant-vowel pattern - the shape difference is usually the fastest tell.

7 ch
affaire
7 ch
affamée

Look-alike desk: affaire vs affamée

A purely visual mix-up. affaire (\a.fɛʁ\) and affamée (\a.fa.me\) are said differently, so reading them aloud is the quickest way to catch the wrong one. On the page they stay close: they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 41111, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

affaire is recorded at frequency rank #526, classified as anoun, pronounced \a.fɛʁ\. affamée is at rank #40,585, tagged as anoun, pronounced \a.fa.me\.

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 41111, this pair ranks #235,495 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of affaire vs affamée

Shared letters: aef. Private to "affaire": ir. Private to "affamée": mé.

"affaire" · 7 letters · shape VCCVVCV  ·  "affamée" · 7 letters · shape VCCVCVV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • affaire ← afafire · afaire · affaier · affairre · affarie · affiare · fafaire

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "affaire" for "affamée" ever safe?
No. They are said differently (\a.fɛʁ\ versus \a.fa.me\) and carry different meanings; reading the sentence aloud is usually enough to catch the wrong one.
Which is more common, "affaire" or "affamée"?
"affaire" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #526 in our French list, against #40,585 for "affamée". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

What to do next

Visual near-miss handled. Browse the word pages or a neighbour when the next look-alike shows up.

  • Full dictionary entry for "affaire" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "affamée" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #235,495 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "affaire" and "affamée" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "affable vs affamée". 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 #235,495 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