ça sent le fouet

/\sa sɑ̃ lə fwɛ\/ phrase

Letters

16 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

ça sent le fouet is aFrenchphrase. It means: Sentir une odeur désagréable. Pronounced \sa sɑ̃ lə fwɛ\.

Key facts for ça sent le fouet
PropertyValue
Headwordça sent le fouet
LanguageFrench
Part of speechPhrase
IPA\sa sɑ̃ lə fwɛ\
Letters16
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

ça sent le fouet 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 ça sent le fouet is 16 letters long, classified as aphrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \sa sɑ̃ lə fwɛ\. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 2 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for ça sent le fouet 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 ça sent le fouet, spelled Ç-A- -S-E-N-T- -L-E- -F-O-U-E-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Sentir une odeur désagréable.
  2. 2
    Se dit d’une affaire, d’une chose suspecte.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "ça sent le fouet"?
"ça sent le fouet" is spelled Ç-A- -S-E-N-T- -L-E- -F-O-U-E-T. The IPA pronunciation is \sa sɑ̃ lə fwɛ\.
What does "ça sent le fouet" mean?
As a phrase, "ça sent le fouet" means: Sentir une odeur désagréable.
How do you pronounce "ça sent le fouet"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "ça sent le fouet" is \sa sɑ̃ lə fwɛ\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "ça sent le fouet" come from?
"ça sent le fouet" 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 Ç 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.