passé simple
The verdict
“passé simple” 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
- 12
- letters
Dominant Wiktionary sense: Temps de conjugaison des verbes français essentiellement utilisé à l’écrit pour la narration.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | passé simple |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \pa.se sɛ̃pl\ |
| Letters | 12 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “passé simple” sits in French frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The French entry for passé simple is 12 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as \pa.se sɛ̃pl\. 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: "Temps de conjugaison des verbes français essentiellement utilisé à l’écrit pour la narration.".
No misspelling variants are generated for passé simple 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 passé simple, spelled P-A-S-S-É- -S-I-M-P-L-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Temps de conjugaison des verbes français essentiellement utilisé à l’écrit pour la narration.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “passé simple”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct French spelling is P-A-S-S-É- -S-I-M-P-L-E — every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as \pa.se sɛ̃pl\ (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 P in our French index: