Charabia

What makes a word sound French? Not its meaning, just the way it rolls off the tongue. Charabia imagines French words that don’t exist but feel like they should.

Some favorites

The best invented words are the ones that seem to already mean something:

• Climatum — sounds like a contraction of climate and ultimatum
• Fignotter — a verb meaning “to meticulously refine,” surely
• Craquille — something small and fragile that might crack; sounds like I could eat it too
• Glandalourdi — someone wonderfully sluggish
• Couchottine — a small, cozy sleeping place

How it works

The idea is simple: using the 142,362 real French words from Lexique.org, learn which letters tend to follow with letter sequences, then generate new words by sampling new letters one by one following those patterns. This is called an N-gram model.

The key parameter is N, the number of preceding characters the model uses to make predictions about the following letter. Small N produces wilder, less recognizable words; large N stays closer to real French — so close that existing words start being generated.

Browse some generated words:

The code works with any language — just swap the word list.