avoir avalé sa langue
\a.vwa.ʁ‿a.va.le sa lɑ̃ɡ\
The verdict
“avoir avalé sa langue” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a verb - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 21
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Garder le silence.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | avoir avalé sa langue |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \a.vwa.ʁ‿a.va.le sa lɑ̃ɡ\ |
| Letters | 21 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “avoir avalé sa langue” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for avoir avalé sa langue is 21 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \a.vwa.ʁ‿a.va.le sa lɑ̃ɡ\. 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: "Garder le silence.".
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for avoir avalé sa langue, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct French form is avoir avalé sa langue, spelled A-V-O-I-R- -A-V-A-L-É- -S-A- -L-A-N-G-U-E.
Definition
- 1Garder le silence.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “avoir avalé sa langue”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is A-V-O-I-R- -A-V-A-L-É- -S-A- -L-A-N-G-U-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \a.vwa.ʁ‿a.va.le sa lɑ̃ɡ\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
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.