clair de lune
The verdict
“clair de lune” 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
- 13
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Clarté de la lune.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | clair de lune |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \klɛʁ də lyn\ |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “clair de lune” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for clair de lune is 13 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \klɛʁ də lyn\. 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 misspelling variants are generated for clair de lune 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 clair de lune, spelled C-L-A-I-R- -D-E- -L-U-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Clarté de la lune.
- 2Tableau qui représente une vue prise au clair de la lune.
This word in other languages
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “clair de lune”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is C-L-A-I-R- -D-E- -L-U-N-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \klɛʁ də lyn\ (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: