être le dos au mur

/\ɛ.tʁə lə do o myʁ\/ verb

Letters

18 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

être le dos au mur is aFrenchverb. It means: Ne plus pouvoir reculer, être obligé de faire face. Pronounced \ɛ.tʁə lə do o myʁ\.

Key facts for être le dos au mur
PropertyValue
Headwordêtre le dos au mur
LanguageFrench
Part of speechVerb
IPA\ɛ.tʁə lə do o myʁ\
Letters18
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

être le dos au mur 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 le dos au mur is 18 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ɛ.tʁə lə do o myʁ\. 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: "Ne plus pouvoir reculer, être obligé de faire face.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for être le dos au mur 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 le dos au mur, spelled Ê-T-R-E- -L-E- -D-O-S- -A-U- -M-U-R, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Ne plus pouvoir reculer, être obligé de faire face.

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "être le dos au mur"?
"être le dos au mur" is spelled Ê-T-R-E- -L-E- -D-O-S- -A-U- -M-U-R. The IPA pronunciation is \ɛ.tʁə lə do o myʁ\.
What does "être le dos au mur" mean?
As a verb, "être le dos au mur" means: Ne plus pouvoir reculer, être obligé de faire face.
How do you pronounce "être le dos au mur"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "être le dos au mur" is \ɛ.tʁə lə do o myʁ\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "être le dos au mur" come from?
"être le dos au mur" 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.