refoulement
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "refoulement", 11-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "refoulement" 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 "refoulement" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
refoulement is aEnglishnoun. It means: The involuntary sending of refugees or asylum seekers to their country of origin or another one, where they are likely to face persecution and harm. Pronounced /ɹəˈfuːlmɒ̃/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | refoulement |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ɹəˈfuːlmɒ̃/ |
| Letters | 11 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for refoulement is 11 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɹəˈfuːlmɒ̃/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for refoulement in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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: Borrowed from French refoulement (“act of pushing something back (as gunpowder into a gun barrel, or water by a dam); act of water overflowing; forced relocation of a group of people; forced repatriation of asylum-seekers or refugees”), from refouler (“to c… 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 refoulement, spelled R-E-F-O-U-L-E-M-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The involuntary sending of refugees or asylum seekers to their country of origin or another one, where they are likely to face persecution and harm.
- 2An instance thereof.
- 3The forced relocation of a group of people.
- 4An instance of that relocation.
Etymology
Borrowed from French refoulement (“act of pushing something back (as gunpowder into a gun barrel, or water by a dam); act of water overflowing; forced relocation of a group of people; forced repatriation of asylum-seekers or refugees”), from refouler (“to cause to flow or turn back; to repress, suppress; to repulse; to trample on again”) (from re- (prefix meaning ‘again’) + fouler (“to impress, stamp; to trample, walk on; to mistreat, oppress”) (ultimately from Medieval Latin fullare (“to make cloth denser and firmer by soaking, beating and pressing, to full”), from Latin fullō (“one who fulls cloth, fuller”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰleh₃- (“to blow; to inflate, swell”)) + -ment (suffix forming nouns from verbs, usually denoting resulting actions or states).
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter R in our English index: