bad cop
The verdict
“bad cop” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a noun — the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 7
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Policier qui, dans une intervention ou un interrogatoire, a pour rôle de se montrer méchant, intransigeant et menaçant pour amener le prévenu à s’ouvrir plus facilement à son collègue, appelé le « ...
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | bad cop |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \bad kɔp\ |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “bad cop” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for bad cop is 7 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \bad kɔp\. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for bad cop 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 bad cop, spelled B-A-D- -C-O-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Policier qui, dans une intervention ou un interrogatoire, a pour rôle de se montrer méchant, intransigeant et menaçant pour amener le prévenu à s’ouvrir plus facilement à son collègue, appelé le « bon cop », qui montre un comportement plus doux et bienveillant.
- 2Personne qui, dans une situation autre que policière, joue un rôle similaire en duo avec une autre personne jouant le rôle du « bon cop ».
- 3Comportement du bad cop dans un contexte qui ne se joue pas nécessairement en duo avec une autre personne, mais qui fait appel à la même dynamique.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “bad cop”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is B-A-D- -C-O-P — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \bad kɔp\ (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
Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter B in our French index: