English Spelling Mistakes French Speakers Make, and How to Fix Them

You can hold a meeting in English, read a contract in English, argue about football in English. And still, somewhere in the third paragraph of an ordinary email, your hand writes "exemple". The spell-checker underlines it, you fix it, and on Thursday you write it again. The same thing happens with "adress", "responsable", "developpement" and "personnality", a small set of words that seem to reset themselves every time you look away.

This is not a sign that your English is weak. It is a side effect of something you have that most learners of English would envy: a first language that shares thousands of words with English, often letter for letter. French gives you a head start on meaning, and then, in a few predictable places, it quietly overrides your spelling.

What follows is a map of those places. You will find the patterns that account for most of the errors, about 60 near-twins sorted by the kind of change that separates them, and a practice method that retrains your hand rather than just reminding your eye. The goal is not to forget French. It is to know exactly where the two languages part company.

Why knowing French causes the mistake

Linguists call the influence of one language on another transfer. Terence Odlin's standard book on the subject, Language Transfer (1989), makes the case that it happens at every level, from pronunciation to grammar to spelling, and that it is a normal part of learning rather than a failure of it. Your brain builds new knowledge on top of old knowledge. That is efficient almost all of the time.

Transfer is strongest with cognates, words that share an origin and look and mean nearly the same in both languages. "Information" and "information" are perfect cognates; "exemple" and "example" are near misses. Research on bilingual reading, including work by Ton Dijkstra and his colleagues in the late 1990s, suggests that when a bilingual person sees a word that exists in both languages, both versions become active at once. There is no switch that turns French off while you write English.

So when you type a word you have known in French for thirty years and in English for ten, the older, better-worn spelling is competing for your fingers. It usually loses. Sometimes, when you are tired or writing fast, it wins.

That explains the frustrating part. You know the English spelling. You would spot the error in someone else's email. The problem is not knowledge but which version your hand retrieves first, and that is a habit, which means it can be changed with the right kind of practice.

How one word became two

English did not borrow a handful of French words. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, French was the language of the English court, the law and the landowning class for roughly three centuries. A very large share of modern English vocabulary, often estimated at around a quarter to a third, came in through French or through Latin by way of French.

But spelling kept moving on both sides of the Channel after the words crossed. In the 1500s, English scholars respelled some borrowings to make them look more like Latin, which is why English has "debt", with a silent b borrowed back from Latin debitum, while French kept "dette". French went through its own reforms. Then, in the early 1800s, Noah Webster pushed American English toward "color", "center" and "defense", pulling it even further from French than British English is.

The result is a large family of words that began as one word and drifted apart in small ways: a letter doubled here, an ending changed there. If you enjoy that history, our piece on why English spelling looks the way it does tells the longer story. For practical purposes, the drift falls into a few kinds, and the kinds are what you need to learn.

Double letters: the biggest trap

If you keep only one section of this page, keep this one. Double consonants cause more errors for French speakers than anything else, for an unkind reason: French and English double different letters in the same word, and neither language is consistently the one that doubles more.

In some words French has the double and English has the single.

In others it is the reverse, and English has the double that French lacks.

Look at the last row for a moment. "Carotte" doubles the t; "carrot" doubles the r. The same word, the same number of letters doubled, in different places. It is the perfect illustration of why no general rule will save you here.

The one pattern worth noticing is in the first table. French doubles the n before its -el and -elle endings (professionnel, traditionnel), and English does not double it before -al (professional, traditional). That single observation fixes a dozen words at once: national, emotional, exceptional, rational, additional. Everything else in these two tables has to be learned word by word, which is less daunting than it sounds, because the list of doubles that actually cause you trouble is probably short.

Endings that change by rule

Here the news is better. Many French and English words differ only in their endings, and the endings shift in regular ways, because each language settled on its own form for the same Latin suffix. Learn the correspondence once and it applies to hundreds of words.

Two cautions come with this table. The first concerns -eur. British English keeps -our in a set of words such as "colour", "honour" and "favour", which sits closer to French, while American English uses -or throughout. Both are correct, and the only real mistake is mixing them in one document. Our guide to British and American spelling will help you choose and stay consistent.

The second concerns -ance and -ence. These mostly match across the two languages, which lulls you into trusting them, and then they don't. French writes "indépendance" and "correspondance"; English writes "independence" and "correspondence", with an e where your French instinct puts an a. If you work in business or administration, "correspondence" and "independence" are probably on your personal list already.

The small letters in the middle

The hardest errors to catch are the ones where the word is almost right. One vowel, one consonant, or one silent e is different, and the eye slides straight past it because the overall shape is familiar.

Then there is the silent e. French ends a great many words in a silent e, and English ends far fewer that way, so French speakers tend to add one that is not there: "probleme", "systeme", "methode", "groupe", "liste", "forme". In each case English stops at the consonant: problem, system, method, group, list, form. A useful check is to say the English word and notice that it ends hard, on the consonant. That hard stop is your cue to stop typing.

The traffic occasionally goes the other way. "Chocolat" gains an e to become "chocolate", "futur" becomes "future", and "juge" becomes "judge", picking up a d along the way. These are fewer, and most French speakers get them right.

Accents, capitals and spaces

English uses almost no accents. A few survive in borrowed words such as "café", "naïve" and "résumé", and even those are often written without them. So an accent inside "développement" or "problème" in an English text is itself the error, and it is one of the easiest to fix, because once you start looking for accents you see them immediately.

Capital letters are a habit rather than a spelling question, but they are one of the most visible marks of French in English writing. French writes days, months and nationalities in lower case: lundi, janvier, français. English capitalizes all of them: Monday, January, French. It also capitalizes adjectives formed from names of places and peoples, so "a french company" and "english courses" both need capitals.

Finally, French typography puts a space before a question mark, colon, semicolon and exclamation mark. English does not. Strictly speaking this is punctuation, not spelling, but readers notice it in exactly the same way, and it is often the first thing that tells an English reader the writer learned French first. Fixing it costs nothing.

When the ear leads the hand

Some errors begin before your fingers move. English has sound distinctions that French does not make, and if two English sounds are the same to your ear, you will sometimes pick the letters for the wrong one.

The clearest case is the short vowel in "ship" against the long vowel in "sheep". Many French speakers hear these as one sound, which produces slips such as "feel" for "fill", "leave" for "live" and "seat" for "sit". Spell-checkers will not catch any of them, because every one is a real word. The "th" sound is a second case; if you say "sink" for "think", your spelling can follow your pronunciation.

The letter h is a third. In French it is always silent. In English it is usually pronounced, as in "hat", "hotel" and "history", with a small set of exceptions ("hour", "honest", "heir", "honor") that are worth learning as a group. Saying the h aloud in all the others helps keep it on the page.

You do not need a native accent to spell well. But saying the English word the English way, even under your breath, gives your hand the English letters to follow instead of the French ones.

A method that changes the habit

Here is the difficulty with every table above. You already knew most of it. You know "example" has an a. Reading the correct spelling again will not help much, because the problem was never knowing; it was retrieving, under time pressure, the English version before the French one.

That is a memory problem, and memory research is clear on what fixes it. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke showed in 2006 that trying to recall information builds stronger memory than reviewing it, even when the review feels more productive. This is called the testing effect, and our piece on why trying to spell a word beats looking at it explains it in more depth. Separately, a large 2006 review by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues found that practice spread across days reliably beats the same amount of practice crammed into one session. Recall, repeated, with gaps between.

Put together, that becomes a simple routine.

1. Keep a twin list. Every time you catch a French spelling in your English, add the English word to a note, with the one letter or ending that differs.
2. Practice from sound, not sight. Have someone say the word, or use a recording, and type it without looking at it first.
3. Look at the exact letter you got wrong, not the whole word. That letter is where French pulled you.
4. Come back after a day, then three days, then a week. A word leaves the list only when you have spelled it right on three separate days.

The second step is the one people skip, and it is the one that matters. Copying a correct word lets your eyes do the work. Producing it from sound makes your memory do it, and the effort is precisely what makes the English version the one your hand reaches for next time. Spelling.School is built on this idea: you hear a word, type it, see exactly which letters went astray, and the word returns just before you would otherwise forget it.

What to do next

Start with the evidence you already have. Open the last ten emails or documents you wrote in English and search them for the patterns on this page: doubled letters, a stray final e, -eur and -ence endings, lower-case days and nationalities. Write down every twin you find. It may be eight words or it may be thirty, but it will be your list, not a generic one, and that is what makes it worth practicing.

Then give that list five or ten minutes a day, from sound, for two or three weeks. If you want a broader view of English spelling for learners, our complete guide for ESL learners is a good companion. If you would rather have the scheduling done for you, you can try five words on Spelling.School without signing up.

Either way, keep in mind where these errors come from. They are the fingerprints of a second language that is genuinely close to English. A little targeted practice, and they stop showing up.

Questions people ask

Why do French speakers misspell address in English?

French spells the word "adresse", with one d and a final e, while English spells it "address", with two d's and no e at the end. Because the words look and mean almost the same, a French speaker's brain activates both spellings, and the older French one often wins when writing quickly. The fix is to practice writing the English word from sound, without looking, on several separate days until it becomes the version your hand produces first.

Which English words are spelled differently from French?

Many shared words differ by a single letter or an ending. Common examples include example (exemple), address (adresse), responsible (responsable), personality (personnalité), development (développement), language (langage), comfortable (confortable) and apartment (appartement). Endings also shift in regular ways: French -eur often becomes English -or, -eux becomes -ous and -aire becomes -ary. Learning those endings as patterns corrects many words at once.

Are French cognates a help or a trap?

Cognates, words that share an origin and look alike in both languages, are both. They let French speakers understand and remember English vocabulary far faster than learners from unrelated languages. But they also pull the hand toward French spellings, especially with double letters, endings and silent e. The practical rule is to trust a cognate for its meaning and check it for its spelling.

How do I stop writing exemple instead of example?

Say the English word aloud and notice the vowel after the x, which sounds like the a in "sample" rather than a French e. Then practice typing "example" from sound, without looking at it first, on at least three different days. Each time you catch "exemple" in your own writing, put it back on your practice list for the next day. Within two or three weeks of this kind of spaced recall, most people find the English form comes out first.

Is British or American spelling easier for French speakers?

British spelling is sometimes closer to French, as in "colour", "centre" and "theatre", which can make it feel more natural. American spelling uses "color", "center" and "theater". Both are correct, and what matters most is using one consistently within a document. If your employer, university or exam states a preference, follow it; otherwise choose one and keep to it.

What is the fastest way for French speakers to improve English spelling?

The fastest route is to work on your own errors rather than a generic list. Check your recent English writing for French spellings, collect every one you find, and practice those words for five to ten minutes a day by typing them from sound. Spread the practice over at least two weeks, because recall repeated across days produces far more durable memory than a single long session.

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