coup de grâce

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for coup de grâce is 13 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kuː də ɡɹɑs/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No misspelling variants are generated for coup de grâce in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Late 17th century. Borrowed from French coup de grâce (“finishing blow”). Originally referring to a merciful stroke putting a fatally wounded person out of misery or to the shot delivered to the head of a prisoner after facing a firing squad. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is coup de grâce, spelled C-O-U-P- -D-E- -G-R-Â-C-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.