pardon-my-french
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
16 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "pardon-my-french", 16-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Wiktionary, and usage frequency ranked against an open word-frequency list covering the top 100,000 English words. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "pardon-my-french" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "pardon-my-french" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
pardon my French is aEnglishverb. It means: To excuse the speaker's frankness of expression or profanity. Pronounced /ˌpɑːdn̩ maɪ ˈfɹɛnt͡ʃ/.
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See how pardon my French compares against similar English words.
Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | pardon my French |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /ˌpɑːdn̩ maɪ ˈfɹɛnt͡ʃ/ |
| Letters | 16 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for pardon my French is 16 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˌpɑːdn̩ maɪ ˈfɹɛnt͡ʃ/. 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: "To excuse the speaker's frankness of expression or profanity.".
No misspelling variants are generated for pardon my French 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: From the use of French to mean “vulgar language”, ostensibly because the words used are not in English. 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 pardon my French, spelled P-A-R-D-O-N- -M-Y- -F-R-E-N-C-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To excuse the speaker's frankness of expression or profanity.
Etymology
From the use of French to mean “vulgar language”, ostensibly because the words used are not in English.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter P in our English index: