paruevspèreTell them apart

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

Which to use

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

#13,857
“parue” frequency rank
#303
“père” frequency rank
14160
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature parue père
Definition Participe passé féminin singulier de paraître (ou paraitre). Mâle ayant fécondé un ovule qui a donné naissance à un enfant ; géniteur.

Where the eye mixes parue and père

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 3 letters in sequence. parue runs 5 letters (CVCVV) against père's 4 (CVCV) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

5 ch
parue
4 ch
père

Why the eye confuses parue with père

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: parue is \pa.ʁy\ while père is \pɛʁ\. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they differ by 1 letter(s) in length, and the parts of speech differ too (verb vs noun), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 14160, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

parue is recorded at frequency rank #13,857, classified as averb, pronounced \pa.ʁy\. père is at rank #303, tagged as anoun, pronounced \pɛʁ\.

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 14160, this pair ranks #397,919 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of parue vs père

Shared letters: epr. Private to "parue": au. Private to "père": è.

"parue" · 5 letters · shape CVCVV  ·  "père" · 4 letters · shape CVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • parueaprue · pareu · parrue · paure · pparue · praue

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "parue" and "père" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "parue" is a verb and "père" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary French text, does "parue" or "père" show up more?
"père" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #303 in our French list, against #13,857 for "parue". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

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

  • Full dictionary entry for "parue" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "père" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #397,919 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "parue" and "père" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "parue vs prude". 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 #397,919 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