jouvsjourConfusable pair

Quick tell: jou is a pronoun, jour is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“jou” is a pronoun and “jour” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#38,878
“jou” frequency rank
#141
“jour” frequency rank
39019
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature jou jour
Definition Pronom personnel objet de la deuxième personne du singulier : te. Période de vingt-quatre heures, commençant généralement à minuit ; en certains lieux et à certaines époques, le jour commençait plutôt avec le lever ou le coucher du soleil.

Letter map: jou vs jour

Shared letters muted; letters that set jou and jour apart highlighted. Shared run: 3.

3 ch
jou
4 ch
jour

Part-of-speech tell for jou / jour

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: jou is apronoun and jouranoun. On the page they differ by 1 extra letter(s) - “jou” sits inside “jour”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 39019, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

jou is recorded at frequency rank #38,878, classified as apron. jour is at rank #141, tagged as anoun, pronounced \ʒuʁ\.

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 39019, this pair ranks #251,085 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of jou vs jour

Shared letters: jou. Private to "jou": -. Private to "jour": r.

"jou" · 3 letters · shape CVV  ·  "jour" · 4 letters · shape CVVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • jourjjour · joru · jourr · juor · ojur

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "jou" and "jour" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "jou" is a pronoun and "jour" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Which is more common, "jou" or "jour"?
"jour" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #141 in our French list, against #38,878 for "jou". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

After this comparison

You've compared "jou" and "jour". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "jou" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "jour" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #251,085 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "jou" and "jour" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "jor vs jou". 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 #251,085 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