langue de bois

/\lɑ̃ɡ də bwa\/ noun

Letters

14 characters

Language

French

word origin

Misspellings

0

tracked variants

Confusables

0

similar word pairs

langue de bois is aFrenchnoun. It means: Artifice rhétorique, trope (ou figure) s'étendant à tout un énoncé, et qui vise à travestir la réalité, notamment au moyen d’euphémismes. Pronounced \lɑ̃ɡ də bwa\.

Key facts for langue de bois
PropertyValue
Headwordlangue de bois
LanguageFrench
Part of speechNoun
IPA\lɑ̃ɡ də bwa\
Letters14
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Frequency rank visualization

langue de bois 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 langue de bois is 14 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \lɑ̃ɡ də bwa\. 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: "Artifice rhétorique, trope (ou figure) s'étendant à tout un énoncé, et qui vise à travestir la réalité, notamment au moyen d’euphémismes.".

No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for langue de bois 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 langue de bois, spelled L-A-N-G-U-E- -D-E- -B-O-I-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.

Definition

  1. 1
    Artifice rhétorique, trope (ou figure) s'étendant à tout un énoncé, et qui vise à travestir la réalité, notamment au moyen d’euphémismes.

Synonyms

Antonyms

This word in other languages

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "langue de bois"?
"langue de bois" is spelled L-A-N-G-U-E- -D-E- -B-O-I-S. The IPA pronunciation is \lɑ̃ɡ də bwa\.
What does "langue de bois" mean?
As a noun, "langue de bois" means: Artifice rhétorique, trope (ou figure) s'étendant à tout un énoncé, et qui vise à travestir la réalité, notamment au moyen d’euphémismes.
How do you pronounce "langue de bois"?
The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription for "langue de bois" is \lɑ̃ɡ də bwa\. Click the speaker icon on the pronunciation badge above to hear it spoken aloud where audio is available.
What language does "langue de bois" come from?
"langue de bois" 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 L 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.