appelvsappeléeConfusable pair

Quick tell: appel is a noun, appelée is a verb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“appel” is a noun and “appelée” is a verb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#703
“appel” frequency rank
#3,314
“appelée” frequency rank
4017
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature appel appelée
Definition Action d’appeler par la voix, par un geste ou par tout autre signal, pour faire venir à soi. Participe passé féminin singulier du verbe appeler.

Where the eye mixes appel and appelée

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 5 letters in sequence.

5 ch
appel
7 ch
appelée

Look-alike desk: appel vs appelée

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: appel is \a.pɛl\ while appelée is \a.pə.le\. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they differ by 2 extra letter(s) - “appel” sits inside “appelée”, and the parts of speech differ too (noun vs verb), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 4017, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

appel is recorded at frequency rank #703, classified as anoun, pronounced \a.pɛl\. appelée is at rank #3,314, tagged as averb, pronounced \a.pə.le\.

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 4017, this pair ranks #432,652 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of appel vs appelée

Shared letters: aelp. Private to "appel": -. Private to "appelée": é.

"appel" · 5 letters · shape VCCVC  ·  "appelée" · 7 letters · shape VCCVCVV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • appelapel · apepl · appell · papel

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "appel" and "appelée" be used interchangeably?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "appel" is a noun and "appelée" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary French text, does "appel" or "appelée" show up more?
"appel" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #703 in our French list, against #3,314 for "appelée". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

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 "appel" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "appelée" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #432,652 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "appel" and "appelée" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "Amiel vs appel". 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 #432,652 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