femme fatale

/\fam fa.tal\/ noun

Letters

12 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

femme fatale is aFrenchnoun. It means: Femme attirante et séduisante, mais dangereuse et qui provoque la perdition des hommes qui tombent amoureux d’elle. Pronounced \fam fa.tal\.

Key facts for femme fatale
PropertyValue
Headwordfemme fatale
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\fam fa.tal\
Letters12
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

femme fatale 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 femme fatale is 12 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \fam fa.tal\. 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: "Femme attirante et séduisante, mais dangereuse et qui provoque la perdition des hommes qui tombent amoureux d’elle.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for femme fatale 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 femme fatale, spelled F-E-M-M-E- -F-A-T-A-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Femme attirante et séduisante, mais dangereuse et qui provoque la perdition des hommes qui tombent amoureux d’elle.

Synonyms

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "femme fatale"?
"femme fatale" is spelled F-E-M-M-E- -F-A-T-A-L-E. The IPA pronunciation is \fam fa.tal\.
What does "femme fatale" mean?
As a noun, "femme fatale" means: Femme attirante et séduisante, mais dangereuse et qui provoque la perdition des hommes qui tombent amoureux d’elle.
How do you pronounce "femme fatale"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "femme fatale" is \fam fa.tal\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "femme fatale" come from?
"femme fatale" 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 F in our French index:

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