mettre la charrue avant les bœufs
The verdict
“mettre la charrue avant les bœufs” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a verb — the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 33
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Commencer par où l’on devrait finir, faire avant ce qui devrait être fait après, faire les choses dans le désordre.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | mettre la charrue avant les bœufs |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \mɛtʁ.(ə).la.ʃa.ʁy.a.vɑ̃.le.bø\ |
| Letters | 33 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “mettre la charrue avant les bœufs” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for mettre la charrue avant les bœufs is 33 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \mɛtʁ.(ə).la.ʃa.ʁy.a.vɑ̃.le.bø\. 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: "Commencer par où l’on devrait finir, faire avant ce qui devrait être fait après, faire les choses dans le désordre.".
No misspelling variants are generated for mettre la charrue avant les bœufs 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 mettre la charrue avant les bœufs, spelled M-E-T-T-R-E- -L-A- -C-H-A-R-R-U-E- -A-V-A-N-T- -L-E-S- -B-Œ-U-F-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Commencer par où l’on devrait finir, faire avant ce qui devrait être fait après, faire les choses dans le désordre.
This word in other languages
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "mettre la charrue avant les bœufs"?
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Using “mettre la charrue avant les bœufs”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is M-E-T-T-R-E- -L-A- -C-H-A-R-R-U-E- -A-V-A-N-T- -L-E-S- -B-Œ-U-F-S — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \mɛtʁ.(ə).la.ʃa.ʁy.a.vɑ̃.le.bø\ (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 M in our French index: