homevshôteConfusable pair

Which to use

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

#6,095
“home” frequency rank
#6,098
“hôte” frequency rank
12193
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature home hôte
Definition Foyer, chez-soi. Celui qui donne l’hospitalité par humanité, par amitié, par bienveillance.

Where the eye mixes home and hôte

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence. home and hôte follow the identical consonant-vowel pattern (CVCV). Same shape at a glance is often the real trap, independent of shared letters.

4 ch
home
4 ch
hôte

Why the eye confuses home with hôte

A purely visual mix-up. home (^((h aspiré))\om\) and hôte (^((h muet))\ot\) 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 12193, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

home is recorded at frequency rank #6,095, classified as anoun, pronounced ^((h aspiré))\om\. hôte is at rank #6,098, tagged as anoun, pronounced ^((h muet))\ot\.

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 12193, this pair ranks #406,223 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of home vs hôte

Shared letters: eh. Private to "home": mo. Private to "hôte": .

"home" · 4 letters · shape CVCV  ·  "hôte" · 4 letters · shape CVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • homehhome · hmoe · hoem · ohme

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "home" and "hôte" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No. They are said differently (^((h aspiré))\om\ versus ^((h muet))\ot\) and carry different meanings; reading the sentence aloud is usually enough to catch the wrong one.
Which is more common, "home" or "hôte"?
"home" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #6,095 in our French list, against #6,098 for "hôte". 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 "home" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "hôte" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #406,223 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "home" and "hôte" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "Hatem vs hôte". 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 #406,223 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