marcher à quatre pattes
\maʁ.ʃe a katʁ pat\
The verdict
“marcher à quatre pattes” is uncommon French (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 23
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Marcher en s’appuyant sur ses quatre pattes chez les animaux quadrupèdes.
Corpus desk
Index FR-marcher-a-quatre-pattes · marcher à quatre pattes · French
marcher à quatre pattes · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 23 letters
- VOW-8 8 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "M" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | marcher à quatre pattes |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \maʁ.ʃe a katʁ pat\ |
| Letters | 23 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Longue queue: rang de « marcher à quatre pattes » en français
Rare enough to double-check
marcher à quatre pattes is uncommon French outside the top frequency list, classed as averb, transcribed \maʁ.ʃe a katʁ pat\. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
marcher à quatre pattes doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable French patterns. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct French form is marcher à quatre pattes, spelled M-A-R-C-H-E-R- -À- -Q-U-A-T-R-E- -P-A-T-T-E-S.
Definition
- 1Marcher en s’appuyant sur ses quatre pattes chez les animaux quadrupèdes.
- 2Chez les humains (et principalement chez les enfants), marcher en s’appuyant sur ses deux mains et ses deux pieds ou, pour plus de facilité, sur ses deux mains et ses deux genoux.
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.