ne tenir ni à clou ni à cheville

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The French entry for ne tenir ni à clou ni à cheville is 32 letters long, classified as a verb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \nə tə.niʁ ni a klu ni a ʃə.vij\. 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: "Ne pouvoir se tenir debout ; être mal assemblé ; être en décrépitude, être de santé délicate".

No misspelling variants are generated for ne tenir ni à clou ni à cheville 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 ne tenir ni à clou ni à cheville, spelled N-E- -T-E-N-I-R- -N-I- -À- -C-L-O-U- -N-I- -À- -C-H-E-V-I-L-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.