couper le mal à la racine

/\ku.pe lə ma.l‿a la ʁa.sin\/ verb

The verdict

“couper le mal à la racine” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a verb — the kind of word writers most often double-check.

Unranked
below top-frequency French
25
letters

Dominant Wiktionary sense: Stopper quelque chose de néfaste à un stade précoce.

Key facts for couper le mal à la racine
PropertyValue
Headwordcouper le mal à la racine
LanguageFrench
Part of speechVerb
IPA\ku.pe lə ma.l‿a la ʁa.sin\
Letters25
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Where “couper le mal à la racine” sits in French frequency

couper le mal à la racine falls outside the top-100,000 ranked French words — the long-tail zone of technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary, exactly where readers second-guess spellings most.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for couper le mal à la racine is 25 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ku.pe lə ma.l‿a la ʁa.sin\. 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: "Stopper quelque chose de néfaste à un stade précoce.".

No misspelling variants are generated for couper le mal à la racine 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 couper le mal à la racine, spelled C-O-U-P-E-R- -L-E- -M-A-L- -À- -L-A- -R-A-C-I-N-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Stopper quelque chose de néfaste à un stade précoce.

Synonyms

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "couper le mal à la racine"?
"couper le mal à la racine" is spelled C-O-U-P-E-R- -L-E- -M-A-L- -À- -L-A- -R-A-C-I-N-E. The IPA pronunciation is \ku.pe lə ma.l‿a la ʁa.sin\.
What does "couper le mal à la racine" mean?
As a verb, "couper le mal à la racine" means: Stopper quelque chose de néfaste à un stade précoce.
How do you pronounce "couper le mal à la racine"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "couper le mal à la racine" is \ku.pe lə ma.l‿a la ʁa.sin\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "couper le mal à la racine" come from?
"couper le mal à la racine" 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.

Using “couper le mal à la racine”

The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.

  • The one correct French spelling is C-O-U-P-E-R- -L-E- -M-A-L- -À- -L-A- -R-A-C-I-N-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
  • Say it as \ku.pe lə ma.l‿a la ʁa.sin\ (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:

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Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.