être au fait

/\ɛtʁ o fɛt\/ verb

Letters

12 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

être au fait is aFrenchverb. It means: Savoir quelque chose, être informé de. Pronounced \ɛtʁ o fɛt\.

Key facts for être au fait
PropertyValue
Headwordêtre au fait
LanguageFrench
Part of speechVerb
IPA\ɛtʁ o fɛt\
Letters12
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

être au fait is not present in the top-100,000 ranked French corpus, typical for technical, archaic, or low-frequency vocabulary.

Source: Wordfreq corpus

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for être au fait is 12 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ɛtʁ o fɛt\. 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: "Savoir quelque chose, être informé de.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for être au fait in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable French patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.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 être au fait, spelled Ê-T-R-E- -A-U- -F-A-I-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Savoir quelque chose, être informé de.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "être au fait"?
"être au fait" is spelled Ê-T-R-E- -A-U- -F-A-I-T. The IPA pronunciation is \ɛtʁ o fɛt\.
What does "être au fait" mean?
As a verb, "être au fait" means: Savoir quelque chose, être informé de.
How do you pronounce "être au fait"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "être au fait" is \ɛtʁ o fɛt\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "être au fait" come from?
"être au fait" 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.

Nearby French words

Other entries that begin with the letter Ê in our French index:

Explore PlainSpell

Data Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Frequency data from Wordfreq. Misspellings derived from Hunspell dictionaries.