chétif

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for chétif is 6 letters long, classified as an adjective, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ʃe.tif\. Corpus data places it at rank #55,143 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "Qui est faible, frêle. — Note d’usage : Se dit des personnes ou des choses qui n’ont pas l’apparence ou les qualités, la force qu’elles devraient avoir.".

We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for chétif, a sign its spelling follows regular French conventions. No confusable counterpart is on file for this word, which usually means its spelling is distinct enough that readers don't reach for a similar-looking word instead.

This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct French form is chétif, spelled C-H-É-T-I-F.