nouveau riche
\nu.vo ʁiʃ\
The verdict
“nouveau riche” is outside the top-ranked French vocabulary, used as a noun - the kind of word writers most often double-check.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency French
- 13
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Personne dont la fortune est récente et qui a tendance à l'afficher au-delà de certaines convenances sociales.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | nouveau riche |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \nu.vo ʁiʃ\ |
| Letters | 13 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “nouveau riche” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for nouveau riche is 13 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \nu.vo ʁiʃ\. 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: "Personne dont la fortune est récente et qui a tendance à l'afficher au-delà de certaines convenances sociales.".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for nouveau riche, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable French rules. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct French form is nouveau riche, spelled N-O-U-V-E-A-U- -R-I-C-H-E.
Definition
- 1Personne dont la fortune est récente et qui a tendance à l'afficher au-delà de certaines convenances sociales.
Synonyms
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “nouveau riche”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is N-O-U-V-E-A-U- -R-I-C-H-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \nu.vo ʁiʃ\ (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
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.