café au lait
/ˌkæfeɪ əʊ ˈleɪ/
"cafe-au-lait" is a 10-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“café au lait” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 12
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A mixture of coffee and hot milk.
Corpus desk
Index EN-cafe-au-lait · café au lait · English
café au lait · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 12 letters
- VOW-6 6 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "C" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | café au lait |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˌkæfeɪ əʊ ˈleɪ/ |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “café au lait” in English
Rare enough to double-check
café au lait is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /ˌkæfeɪ əʊ ˈleɪ/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
No generated misspelling entries exist for café au lait in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from French café au lait (literally “coffee with milk”). The correct English form is café au lait, spelled C-A-F-É- -A-U- -L-A-I-T.
Definition
- 1A mixture of coffee and hot milk.
- 2Coffee and hot milk served in separate jugs as a breakfast drink.
- 3A light coffee colour.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how café au lait appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
It was like using a language I'd once known but had nearly forgotten, a language having to do with customs that had long before passed out of the world: café au lait at an outdoor table, with a brioche, absinthe in a tall glass, or shrimp in a cornucopia of newspaper; things I'd once read about but had never seen.
Seen all of a piece like this, in a picture that fits snugly into the lens of any camera, Kersey is a peaceful, multi-coloured Toytown of a village, whose red-tiled roofs are subdued by just the right amount of weathering and lichen, and whose overhanging gables thrust forward in a quiet brilliance of red-and-yellow ochre, pink, white and café-au-lait.
Etymology
Borrowed from French café au lait (literally “coffee with milk”).
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.