drôle de guerre
\dʁol də ɡɛʁ\
The verdict
“drôle de guerre” 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
- 15
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) — État d’attentisme et de quasi absence d’affrontements entre la déclaration de guerre de la France à l’Allemagne le 3 septembre 1939 et l’offensive allemande du 10 mai 1940.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | drôle de guerre |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \dʁol də ɡɛʁ\ |
| Letters | 15 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “drôle de guerre” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for drôle de guerre is 15 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \dʁol də ɡɛʁ\. 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: "État d’attentisme et de quasi absence d’affrontements entre la déclaration de guerre de la France à l’Allemagne le 3 septembre 1939 et l’offensive allemande du 10 mai 1940.".
No misspelling variants are generated for drôle de guerre 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 drôle de guerre, spelled D-R-Ô-L-E- -D-E- -G-U-E-R-R-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1État d’attentisme et de quasi absence d’affrontements entre la déclaration de guerre de la France à l’Allemagne le 3 septembre 1939 et l’offensive allemande du 10 mai 1940.
This word in other languages
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, “drôle de guerre, 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/drole-de-guerre
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “drôle de guerre”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is D-R-Ô-L-E- -D-E- -G-U-E-R-R-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \dʁol də ɡɛʁ\ (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 D in our French index: