touchéevstoucherWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: touchée is a adjective, toucher is a verb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“touchée” is an adjective and “toucher” is a verb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#8,629
“touchée” frequency rank
#2,152
“toucher” frequency rank
10781
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature touchée toucher
Definition Féminin singulier de touché. Mettre la main sur quelque chose.

Same sound, different letters: touchée vs toucher

Muted letters are shared; highlighted letters are the only spelling cue when pronunciation matches. Shared run: 6 letters.

7 ch
touchée
7 ch
toucher

Homophone desk: touchée vs toucher

Say them out loud and nothing separates them: touchée and toucher carry the same recorded pronunciation, \tu.ʃe\. Grammar is what tells them apart: one is anadjective, the other averb, so most sentences will only accept one of them. They share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 10781, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

touchée is recorded at frequency rank #8,629, classified as anadj, pronounced \tu.ʃe\. toucher is at rank #2,152, tagged as averb, pronounced \tu.ʃe\.

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 10781, this pair ranks #411,686 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of touchée vs toucher

Shared letters: cehotu. Private to "touchée": é. Private to "toucher": r.

"touchée" · 7 letters · shape CVVCCVV  ·  "toucher" · 7 letters · shape CVVCCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • toucherotucher · tocuher · touccher · toucehr · toucherr · touchher · touchre · touhcer

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "touchée" and "toucher" be used interchangeably?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "touchée" is an adjective and "toucher" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary French text, does "touchée" or "toucher" show up more?
"toucher" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #2,152 in our French list, against #8,629 for "touchée". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

What to do next

You've separated the homophone pair "touchée" / "toucher". Follow the links when you need the full entry or a neighbour that trips the same ear.

  • Full dictionary entry for "touchée" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "toucher" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #411,686 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "touchée" and "toucher" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "torcher vs touchée". 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 #411,686 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