idiot box

/\ˈɪd.iː.ət ˈbɒks\/ noun

Letters

9 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

idiot box is aFrenchnoun. It means: Télévision, boîte à cons. Note d’usage : Pourrait aussi s’appliquer aux écrans d’ordinateur et aux tablettes. Pronounced \ˈɪd.iː.ət ˈbɒks\.

Key facts for idiot box
PropertyValue
Headwordidiot box
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\ˈɪd.iː.ət ˈbɒks\
Letters9
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

idiot box 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 idiot box is 9 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ˈɪd.iː.ət ˈbɒks\. 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: "Télévision, boîte à cons. Note d’usage : Pourrait aussi s’appliquer aux écrans d’ordinateur et aux tablettes.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for idiot box 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 idiot box, spelled I-D-I-O-T- -B-O-X, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Télévision, boîte à cons. Note d’usage : Pourrait aussi s’appliquer aux écrans d’ordinateur et aux tablettes.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "idiot box"?
"idiot box" is spelled I-D-I-O-T- -B-O-X. The IPA pronunciation is \ˈɪd.iː.ət ˈbɒks\.
What does "idiot box" mean?
As a noun, "idiot box" means: Télévision, boîte à cons. Note d’usage : Pourrait aussi s’appliquer aux écrans d’ordinateur et aux tablettes.
How do you pronounce "idiot box"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "idiot box" is \ˈɪd.iː.ət ˈbɒks\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "idiot box" come from?
"idiot box" 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 I 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.