il vaut mieux arriver en retard qu’arriver en corbillard

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for il vaut mieux arriver en retard qu’arriver en corbillard is 56 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \il vo mjø a.ʁi.ve ɑ̃ ʁə.taʁ ka.ʁi.ve ɑ̃ kɔʁ.bi.jaʁ\. 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: "Il vaut mieux faire quelque chose bien, minutieusement, que de faire tout de travers.".

No misspelling variants are generated for il vaut mieux arriver en retard qu’arriver en corbillard 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 il vaut mieux arriver en retard qu’arriver en corbillard, spelled I-L- -V-A-U-T- -M-I-E-U-X- -A-R-R-I-V-E-R- -E-N- -R-E-T-A-R-D- -Q-U-’-A-R-R-I-V-E-R- -E-N- -C-O-R-B-I-L-L-A-R-D, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.