chef-lieu de département
\ʃɛf.ljø də de.paʁ.tə.mɑ̃\
The verdict
“chef-lieu de département” 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
- 24
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) — Commune où est située la préfecture d’un département.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | chef-lieu de département |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ʃɛf.ljø də de.paʁ.tə.mɑ̃\ |
| Letters | 24 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “chef-lieu de département” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for chef-lieu de département is 24 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ʃɛf.ljø də de.paʁ.tə.mɑ̃\. 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: "Commune où est située la préfecture d’un département.".
No misspelling variants are generated for chef-lieu de département 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 chef-lieu de département, spelled C-H-E-F---L-I-E-U- -D-E- -D-É-P-A-R-T-E-M-E-N-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Commune où est située la préfecture d’un département.
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.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “chef-lieu de département, French word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/fr/mot/chef-lieu-de-departement
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “chef-lieu de département”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is C-H-E-F---L-I-E-U- -D-E- -D-É-P-A-R-T-E-M-E-N-T - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \ʃɛf.ljø də de.paʁ.tə.mɑ̃\ (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 C in our French index: