culvsculsWhich spelling fits?

Which to use

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

#999
“cul” frequency rank
#12,545
“culs” frequency rank
13544
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature cul culs
Definition Derrière d’un animal, d’un humain, ses fesses, son postérieur. Pluriel de cul.

Same sound, different letters: cul vs culs

Muted letters are shared; highlighted letters are the only spelling cue when pronunciation matches. Shared run: 3 letters.

3 ch
cul
4 ch
culs

Homophone desk: cul vs culs

This is the hard kind. cul and culs are pronounced identically (\ky\) 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) - “cul” sits inside “culs”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 13544, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

cul is recorded at frequency rank #999, classified as anoun, pronounced \ky\. culs is at rank #12,545, tagged as anoun, pronounced \ky\.

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 13544, this pair ranks #400,566 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of cul vs culs

Shared letters: clu. Private to "cul": -. Private to "culs": s.

"cul" · 3 letters · shape CVC  ·  "culs" · 4 letters · shape CVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • culscculs · clus · culls · culss · cusl · ucls

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "cul" and "culs" be used interchangeably?
No. They are pronounced the same (\ky\), which is exactly why they get swapped in writing, but the dictionary meanings above are different, and pronunciation is no guide here.
In ordinary French text, does "cul" or "culs" show up more?
"cul" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #999 in our French list, against #12,545 for "culs". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

What to do next

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

  • Full dictionary entry for "cul" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "culs" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #400,566 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "cul" and "culs" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "culs vs ky". 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 #400,566 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