doorvsdouxWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: door is a noun, doux is an adjective, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“door” is a noun and “doux” is an adjective - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#26,697
“door” frequency rank
#2,316
“doux” frequency rank
29013
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature door doux
Definition Porte. Agréable au toucher.

Where the eye mixes door and doux

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence.

4 ch
door
4 ch
doux

Visual trap between door and doux

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: door is \dɔɹ\ while doux is \du\. 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 adjective), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 29013, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

door is recorded at frequency rank #26,697, classified as anoun, pronounced \dɔɹ\. doux is at rank #2,316, tagged as anadj, pronounced \du\.

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 29013, this pair ranks #319,283 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of door vs doux

Shared letters: do. Private to "door": r. Private to "doux": ux.

"door" · 4 letters · shape CVVC  ·  "doux" · 4 letters · shape CVVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • doorddoor · doorr · doro · odor
  • douxddoux · douxx · doxu · duox · odux

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "door" for "doux" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "door" is a noun and "doux" an adjective, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Which is more common, "door" or "doux"?
"doux" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #2,316 in our French list, against #26,697 for "door". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

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

  • Full dictionary entry for "door" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "doux" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #319,283 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "door" and "doux" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "domi vs door". 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 #319,283 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