belle-sœur

/\bɛl.sœʁ\/ noun

Letters

10 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

belle-sœur is aFrenchnoun. It means: Sœur du conjoint ou de la conjointe. Pronounced \bɛl.sœʁ\.

Key facts for belle-sœur
PropertyValue
Headwordbelle-sœur
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\bɛl.sœʁ\
Letters10
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

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

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for belle-sœur is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \bɛl.sœʁ\. 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 frequent misspelling variants are recorded for belle-sœur in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French 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.

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 belle-sœur, spelled B-E-L-L-E---S-Œ-U-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Sœur du conjoint ou de la conjointe.
  2. 2
    Épouse du frère ou de la sœur.
  3. 3
    Tout parent féminin en liaison généalogique par une séquence quelconque de liens de fraternité et d’alliance, comme par exemple la conjointe du beau-frère, ou de la belle-sœur, c’est-à-dire l’épouse du frère ou de la sœur du conjoint.

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "belle-sœur"?
"belle-sœur" is spelled B-E-L-L-E---S-Œ-U-R. The IPA pronunciation is \bɛl.sœʁ\.
What does "belle-sœur" mean?
As a noun, "belle-sœur" means: Sœur du conjoint ou de la conjointe.
How do you pronounce "belle-sœur"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "belle-sœur" is \bɛl.sœʁ\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "belle-sœur" come from?
"belle-sœur" 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 B in our French index:

Explore PlainSpell

Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Frequency data from Wordfreq. Misspellings derived from Hunspell dictionaries.