nager comme une clé
The verdict
“nager comme une clé” 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
- 19
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Très mal nager, ne pas réussir à rester à la surface de l’eau.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | nager comme une clé |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | \na.ʒe kɔ.m‿yn kle\ |
| Letters | 19 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “nager comme une clé” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for nager comme une clé is 19 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \na.ʒe kɔ.m‿yn kle\. 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: "Très mal nager, ne pas réussir à rester à la surface de l’eau.".
No misspelling variants are generated for nager comme une clé 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 nager comme une clé, spelled N-A-G-E-R- -C-O-M-M-E- -U-N-E- -C-L-É, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Très mal nager, ne pas réussir à rester à la surface de l’eau.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “nager comme une clé”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is N-A-G-E-R- -C-O-M-M-E- -U-N-E- -C-L-É — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \na.ʒe kɔ.m‿yn kle\ (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 N in our French index: