Dépendil

Dépendil is a nonstandard rendering that has appeared in discussions of French orthography. It is not a recognized conjugation of the verb dépendre and is not listed in standard dictionaries. In linguistic and typographic contexts it is typically described as an erroneous form resulting from the omission of a hyphen in inverted questions, where French normally requires a hyphen between the verb and the subject pronoun.

In standard French, questions formed by inversion of a verb and its subject pronoun use the structure verb-pronoun with a hyphen, as in dépend-il? The hyphen helps maintain clarity when the verb ends with a consonant and the following element is a pronoun. When the hyphen is omitted, as in dépendil, the text risks misreading or appearing nonstandard, particularly in formal writing, publishing, or educational materials.

Dépendil is thus cited as a cautionary example in French pedagogy and typographic references, and is sometimes produced by optical character recognition (OCR) or autocorrect processes that strip or fail to insert punctuation marks. It has no separate lexical meaning beyond being a contested orthographic form of dépendre in inversion contexts.

See also: French orthography, Inversion (French), Hyphen usage in French, OCR and autocorrect errors.