le poisson pourrit par la tête
The verdict
“le poisson pourrit par la tête” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a phrase - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 30
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Les problèmes d’une organisation commencent par ceux qui la dirigent.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | le poisson pourrit par la tête |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Phrase |
| IPA | \lə pwa.sɔ̃ pu.ʁi paʁ la tɛt\ |
| Letters | 30 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “le poisson pourrit par la tête” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for le poisson pourrit par la tête is 30 letters long, classified as a phrase, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \lə pwa.sɔ̃ pu.ʁi paʁ la tɛt\. 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: "Les problèmes d’une organisation commencent par ceux qui la dirigent.".
No misspelling variants are generated for le poisson pourrit par la tête 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 le poisson pourrit par la tête, spelled L-E- -P-O-I-S-S-O-N- -P-O-U-R-R-I-T- -P-A-R- -L-A- -T-Ê-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Les problèmes d’une organisation commencent par ceux qui la dirigent.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Cite this page
Free to reuse with attribution (CC BY-SA). Copy the citation:
PlainSpell, “le poisson pourrit par la tête, French word data” (May 6, 2026). Derived from Wiktionary (kaikki.org, CC BY-SA) and an open word-frequency list. https://plainspell.com/fr/mot/le-poisson-pourrit-par-la-tete
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “le poisson pourrit par la tête”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is L-E- -P-O-I-S-S-O-N- -P-O-U-R-R-I-T- -P-A-R- -L-A- -T-Ê-T-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \lə pwa.sɔ̃ pu.ʁi paʁ la tɛt\ (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Browse more French words and confusable pairs in the same reference. French words
Nearby French words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our French index: