nouveau-riche

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for nouveau riche is 13 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌnuː.vəʊ ˈɹiːʃ/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "New money; wealthy persons whose fortunes are newly acquired, and who are therefore perceived to lack the refinement of those who were raised wealthy.".

No misspelling variants are generated for nouveau riche 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: An unadapted borrowing from French nouveau riche (literally “new rich”). 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 nouveau riche, spelled N-O-U-V-E-A-U- -R-I-C-H-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.