à-coup

/\a.ku\/ noun

Letters

6 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

à-coup is aFrenchnoun. It means: Mouvement saccadé, temps d’arrêt brusque. Il se dit entre autres en parlant des mouvements de ce genre et des temps d’arrêt qui nuisent à la précision, à la régularité dans les exercices d’équitati... Pronounced \a.ku\.

Key facts for à-coup
PropertyValue
Headwordà-coup
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\a.ku\
Letters6
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

à-coup is not present in the top-100,000 ranked French corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for à-coup is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \a.ku\. 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 misspelling variants are generated for à-coup in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French 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.

No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct French form is à-coup, spelled À---C-O-U-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Mouvement saccadé, temps d’arrêt brusque. Il se dit entre autres en parlant des mouvements de ce genre et des temps d’arrêt qui nuisent à la précision, à la régularité dans les exercices d’équitation et dans les manœuvres d’une troupe.
  2. 2
    Cahot intermittent, accident de parcours, changement brusque.
  3. 3
    Dérivée de l’accélération par rapport au temps.
  4. 4
    Diminution brusque et de faible amplitude de la rigidité d’une éprouvette, due à la propagation instantanée et limitée d’une fissure dans une zone fragile de cette éprouvette au cours d’un essai de détermination de la ténacité d’un matériau.

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "à-coup"?
"à-coup" is spelled À---C-O-U-P. The IPA pronunciation is \a.ku\.
What does "à-coup" mean?
As a noun, "à-coup" means: Mouvement saccadé, temps d’arrêt brusque. Il se dit entre autres en parlant des mouvements de ce genre et des temps d’arrêt qui nuisent à la précision, à la régularité dans les exercices d’équitati...
How do you pronounce "à-coup"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "à-coup" is \a.ku\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "à-coup" come from?
"à-coup" is a French word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Nearby French words

Other entries that begin with the letter À in our French index:

Explore PlainSpell

Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.