oncevsoptéWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: once is a noun, opté is a verb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“once” is a noun and “opté” is a verb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#11,815
“once” frequency rank
#14,748
“opté” frequency rank
26563
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature once opté
Definition Unité de mesure de la masse (système impérial britannique avoirdupois), qui vaut 28,3495231 grammes pour l'once commune → voir ounce. Ses symboles sont oz et ℥. L'once troy (troy ounce) équivaut pour sa part à 31,1034768 grammes. Participe passé masculin singulier de opter.

Where the eye mixes once and opté

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 1 letter in sequence.

4 ch
once
4 ch
opté

Look-alike desk: once vs opté

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: once is \ɔ̃s\ while opté is \ɔp.te\. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they share most of their letters but differ in 3 positions, and the parts of speech differ too (noun vs verb), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 26563, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

once is recorded at frequency rank #11,815, classified as anoun, pronounced \ɔ̃s\. opté is at rank #14,748, tagged as averb, pronounced \ɔp.te\.

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 26563, this pair ranks #334,230 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of once vs opté

Shared letters: o. Private to "once": cen. Private to "opté": pté.

"once" · 4 letters · shape VCCV  ·  "opté" · 4 letters · shape VCCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • onceocne · oncce · onec · onnce

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "once" and "opté" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "once" is a noun and "opté" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary French text, does "once" or "opté" show up more?
"once" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #11,815 in our French list, against #14,748 for "opté". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

Eye-level mix-up between "once" and "opté" is sorted above. Next: full entries or other pairs that share a letter shape.

  • Full dictionary entry for "once" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "opté" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #334,230 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "once" and "opté" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "opté vs OSCE". 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 #334,230 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