oriflamme
The verdict
“oriflamme” is an uncommon French word, ranked #89,987 in French word frequency and used as a noun.
- #89,987
- frequency rank, French
- 9
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Petit étendard dont la partie flottante était terminée en pointes, qui fut d’abord la bannière de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis et qui fut porté jusqu’au XVᵉ siècle devant les rois de France quand ils al...
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | oriflamme |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ɔ.ʁi.flɑm\ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Frequency rank | #89,987 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “oriflamme” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for oriflamme is 9 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \ɔ.ʁi.flɑm\. Corpus data places it at rank #89,987 in overall French word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No misspelling variants are generated for oriflamme 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 oriflamme, spelled O-R-I-F-L-A-M-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Petit étendard dont la partie flottante était terminée en pointes, qui fut d’abord la bannière de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis et qui fut porté jusqu’au XVᵉ siècle devant les rois de France quand ils allaient à la guerre.
- 2Bannière analogue.
- 3Voile imprimée servant de support de communication.
- 4Meuble représentant une bannière d’apparat dans les armoiries. Elle est généralement représentée étroite, longue, animée d’un mouvement comme battant au vent et terminée par deux ou trois pointes. Elle est attachée à une lance. On la qualifie d’emmanchée quand la lance est d’un autre émail. Il est à noter que traditionnellement, elle porte à chaque pointe des houppes de laine verte (sinople) qui ont disparu des représentations modernes. Rarement seule, elle est souvent utilisée comme attribut pour un chevalier ou saint combattant. À rapprocher de bannière, étendard, gonfanon, guidon, pavillon et pennon.
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); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 French corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “oriflamme”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is O-R-I-F-L-A-M-M-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \ɔ.ʁi.flɑm\ (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 O in our French index: