bouche bée
The verdict
“bouche bée” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as an adverb — the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 10
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Comme frappé de stupeur ou d’étonnement.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | bouche bée |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Adverb |
| IPA | \buʃ be\ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “bouche bée” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for bouche bée is 10 letters long, classified as an adverb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \buʃ be\. 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: "Comme frappé de stupeur ou d’étonnement.".
No misspelling variants are generated for bouche bée 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 bouche bée, spelled B-O-U-C-H-E- -B-É-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Comme frappé de stupeur ou d’étonnement.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “bouche bée”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is B-O-U-C-H-E- -B-É-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \buʃ be\ (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: