mettre la main à la pâte
The verdict
“mettre la main à la pâte” 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
- 24
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Participer à la tâche, au travail qu’il y a à faire, travailler soi-même à quelque chose, s’engager dans une action concrète.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | mettre la main à la pâte |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \mɛtʁ la mɛ̃ a la pɑt\ |
| Letters | 24 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “mettre la main à la pâte” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for mettre la main à la pâte is 24 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \mɛtʁ la mɛ̃ a la pɑt\. 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: "Participer à la tâche, au travail qu’il y a à faire, travailler soi-même à quelque chose, s’engager dans une action concrète.".
No misspelling variants are generated for mettre la main à la pâte 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 main à la pâte, spelled M-E-T-T-R-E- -L-A- -M-A-I-N- -À- -L-A- -P-Â-T-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Participer à la tâche, au travail qu’il y a à faire, travailler soi-même à quelque chose, s’engager dans une action concrète.
This word in other languages
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “mettre la main à la pâte”
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- -M-A-I-N- -À- -L-A- -P-Â-T-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \mɛtʁ la mɛ̃ a la pɑt\ (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: