appelvsappelsConfusable pair

Which to use

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

#703
“appel” frequency rank
#3,122
“appels” frequency rank
3825
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature appel appels
Definition Action d’appeler par la voix, par un geste ou par tout autre signal, pour faire venir à soi. Pluriel de appel.

Same sound, different letters: appel vs appels

Muted letters are shared; highlighted letters are the only spelling cue when pronunciation matches. Shared run: 5 letters.

5 ch
appel
6 ch
appels

Ear matches; page differs - appel and appels

This is the hard kind. appel and appels are pronounced identically (\a.pɛl\) and both work as anoun. Neither the ear nor the grammar will rescue you; only the meaning does, so the glosses below are the whole decision. They differ by 1 extra letter(s) - “appel” sits inside “appels”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 3825, 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\. appels is at rank #3,122, tagged as anoun, pronounced \a.pɛl\.

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 3825, this pair ranks #433,123 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of appel vs appels

Shared letters: aelp. Private to "appel": -. Private to "appels": s.

"appel" · 5 letters · shape VCCVC  ·  "appels" · 6 letters · shape VCCVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • appelapel · apepl · appell · papel
  • appelsapels · apepls · appells · appelss · appesl · apples · papels

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "appel" and "appels" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No. They are pronounced the same (\a.pɛl\), which is exactly why they get swapped in writing, but the dictionary meanings above are different, and pronunciation is no guide here.
Frequency check: "appel" vs "appels" - which ranks higher?
"appel" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #703 in our French list, against #3,122 for "appels". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

"appel" and "appels" share a sound, keep the gloss open, then jump to the headword or a nearby trap.

  • Full dictionary entry for "appel" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "appels" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #433,123 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "appel" and "appels" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "appâts vs appels". 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 #433,123 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